What Mr. Hubbard’s technology introduced to that dismal picture was nothing less than revolutionary. It isolated not only the true cause of illiteracy but provided a workable solution. Within three decades of being introduced, study technology brought the gift of literacy to millions around the world, through teachers in Africa, educators in China, and tutors in the inner cities of the United States.
Mr. Hubbard’s contributions to education have not been limited to these benefits. As early as 1938, in a letter to a university dean, Mr. Hubbard criticized mass education which was resulting in “frozen, fact-laden minds.” Students, he pointed out, “were not being taught to think or study, they were being taught to gorge facts, however disrelated, obtuse or useless.” At the core of that problem was an educational establishment which, “through no particular fault of its own and despite every effort it has made to free itself, yet, through lack of tools, is forced to follow scholastic methods.” The solution to resolving problems in education was not to try and fix something wrong in the student. Rather, the answer lay in correcting the educational system itself. It was a solution he would expand upon again and again, particularly after 1950.
Throughout the ensuing decades that sentiment permeated society. Headlines began to pose the question, “What’s wrong with our schools?” And by 1997, the widespread demand to improve educational methods had become front cover feature material for weekly newsmagazines.
Once again, Mr. Hubbard’s innovative view had become the accepted norm in society and was being forwarded by those who had no clue Mr. Hubbard’s ideas had catalyzed the change. And just as those ideas seeped into society, so too did Mr. Hubbard’s study techniques. By the end of the 1990s, even our public school systems began to seek ways to implement his study methods in their classrooms, and soon educators around the world were recognizing his techniques as common practice.
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