Each of the girls was a near clone of one of the parents. Alissa and Katy were Paul, pale and blond, but more sharp-featured, with dimpled noses and sculpted cheekbones. Lauren, the middle daughter, was Diane, inheriting her half-Greek mother’s olive skin and dark, Mediterranean eyes. The girls were bright, inquisitive, and cheerful by nature, but their parents’ divorce was an endless, churning, distracting, heartbreaking trauma, and it took a toll.
The girls went to Delphi Academy, a private school that uses Hubbard “study tech.” It is largely self-guided. According to Scientology pedagogy, there are three barriers that retard a student’s progress. The first is “Lack of Mass.” This principle was derived from Alfred Korzybski’s observation that the word and the object that it names are not the same thing. If the student is studying tractors, for instance, it is best to have a real tractor in front of him. The absence of the actual object is disorienting to the student. “It makes him feel physiologically condensed,” Hubbard writes. “Actually makes him feel squashed. Makes him feel bent, sort of spinny, sort of dead, bored, exasperated.” Photographs of the object can help, or motion pictures, as they are “a sort of promise of hope of the mass,” but they are not an adequate substitute for the tractor under study. The result for the student is that he becomes dizzy, he’ll have headaches, his stomach gets upset, his eyes will hurt, and “he’s going to wind up with a face that feels squashed.” Illness and even suicide may be the expected result. Hubbard’s study tech remedies the problem by using clay or Play-Doh for the student to make replicas of the object.
The second principle is “Too Steep a Gradient,” which Hubbard describes as the difficulty a student encounters when he makes a leap he’s not prepared for. “It is a sort of a confusion or a reelingness that goes with this one,” Hubbard writes. His solution is to go back to the point where the student fully understands the subject, then break the material into bite-size pieces.
The “Undefined Word”—the third and most important principle—occurs when the student tries to absorb material while bypassing the definition of the words employed. “THE ONLY REASON A PERSON GIVES UP A STUDY OR BECOMES CONFUSED OR UNABLE TO LEARN IS BECAUSE HE HAS GONE PAST A WORD THAT WAS NOT UNDERSTOOD,” Hubbard emphasizes in one of his chiding technical bulletins. “WORDS SOMETIMES HAVE DIFFERENT OR MORE THAN ONE MEANING.” A misunderstood word “gives one a distinctly blank feeling or a washed out feeling,” Hubbard writes. “A not-there feeling and a sort of an hysteria will follow in the back of that.” The solution is to have a large dictionary at hand, preferably one with lots of pictures in it. All Scientology texts contain glossaries for specialized Scientology terms. The need to understand the meaning of words, Hubbard writes, “is a sweepingly fantastic discovery in the field of education and don’t neglect it.”
These last two principles are fundamental to the induction of Scientology itself. Because the church asserts that everything Hubbard wrote or spoke is inarguably true, whatever you don’t understand or accept is your fault. The solution is to go back and study the words and approach the material in a more deliberate fashion. Eventually, you’ll get it. Then you can move on.
Lauren loved her teacher at Delphi, but the Hubbard method placed the responsibility of learning almost entirely on the student. For Lauren, her parents’ tumultuous divorce was a crushing distraction. It seemed to her that no one was paying attention to her, either at home or at school. She was illiterate until she was eleven. She couldn’t read or write her own name.