Save the child and you save the nation.

If, in the course of the next fifteen years, Scientologists were to specialize in the group processing of children, it might well follow that all of the goals of Scientology would thereby be realized. Thus, by processing children between the ages of six and ten, we would achieve in fifteen years a sanity and alertness never before obtained in that portion of the populace between the ages of 21 and 26, the age bracket which contains the energy and influence most strikingly felt by a civilization.

Child Scientology could very well be, in terms of practice, the most important single field of endeavor in the science. So used, without other addresses or assistances, Scientology might well bring about the condition of world peace — even if only by eradicating, through the restoration of sanity, the enthusiasm of youth for the sham glory of war. Therefore, we address here a subject which is broader than “what will I do to cure Johnnie’s sneezes.” Whether or not we are interested in those sneezes, whether or not we have tolerance or intolerance for children, whether or not we care to give time to the problems of child adjustment and sanity, each of us who has a vested interest in the continuation of Earth and of Man should be willing to invest some of his industry in the investigation and application of the group processing of children.

Hence, this article is written, not to those who are interested in children, not to those who have family problems, not even to those whose duty it is to instruct children, but to anyone interested in the goals of Scientology.

In order to utilize Scientology in the attainment of the goal of a sane stratum of the populace, do you need special training? No, not beyond the contents of this article and a knowledge of the book Self Analysis in Scientology, a simple text.

What passport do you need to help children? None.

What recommendations, papers, figures, historical documents, statistics, and other buffoonery do you need to assist children? None.

Is there any lack of groups of children? No. Where are groups of children to be found? In schools, in hospitals, in orphan asylums, in children’s societies, in boy and girl organizations such as the Boy Scouts, in the YMCA’s, in Sunday Schools, and anywhere that interested people forward the battle to prepare the child of today to become the sane adult of tomorrow. Theirs has been a gallant struggle in the face of almost insuperable odds. It is time these people had some help.

Historically, child therapy has been as difficult as it is now simple.

Let us be very blunt — we are not interested in the problems of the child’s mind.

In Scientology, we are no longer concerned with the inopportune and conceited short-circuit between epistemology and the human brain which has resulted in the “science” of psychotherapy. The Scientologist practicing with groups of children should disabuse anyone in authority of any lingering thought that the Scientologist might be using psychotherapy. The concern of psychotherapy is with the thinking processes of the human brain. The concern of the Scientologist is purely with the beingness of the child, which is to say his spirit, his potentialities, and his happiness. A Scientologist working with children, who permits himself to be led into arguments concerning psychotherapy is permitting to exist and be part of the argument the erroneous concept that gains in learning and behavior are attainable through a rearrangement, by direct address, of the physical habits or fears of the child.

It is possible to reform a child’s attitude toward existence by working with his mind. The best results in the field of psychotherapy were obtained by Dianetics, but even prior to Dianetics, many child psychotherapists had obtained considerably improved attitudes and behavior on the part of children by directly addressing the individual child and forming with the child a personal friendship which opened the child’s interest sufficiently to permit an awareness of the existing conditions of present time. This was possible because the child’s awareness of present time could be suppressed by incidents which, having force and stress contained in them, sought to represent in themselves that they were present time. But this does not say that the optimum results are obtainable by this process of addressing the past in order to heal the present. Psychotherapy could be said to be a series of processes by which the past is addressed to remedy the present or by which physical matter, such as the human brain, is rearranged (as in a prefrontal lobotomy) in order to inhibit odious conduct in present time. The 500 or 600 percent gains obtainable by the application of Child Scientology to groups of children are not obtainable by addressing the past to remedy the present.

Scientology increases the beingness and potentialities of beingness of the child in present time in order to secure the capabilities of the child in the future. It does this by exercising the capabilities of beingness of the child, and is about as closely related to psychotherapy as penmanship might be, or, for that matter, any other subject in the school curriculum. Thus, no one can reasonably object, on the grounds that psychotherapy is being practiced, to the education of the child in present time so as to fit him for his future.

It will be very difficult for the Scientologist to keep himself from being led into this snare, because tests in child psychology on those in his group will indicate that their reading ages leap under this process, that children who have never been able to master even rudimentary subjects begin to learn, and that behavior which, in the past, has been highly lacking in good order and discipline turns markedly for the better. These and many other advantages to be gained in the application of Child Scientology to groups of children cannot be classified as psychotherapy simply because they attain the goals of psychotherapy. Because a thing obtains the goals another thing hoped to obtain, is no reason to assume that the two are identical. This obtaining of goals was never accomplished in terms of groups by psychotherapy, and, indeed, psychotherapy never attained these goals — even on individual children. But that person who immediately proclaims that we now have child psychotherapy simply because we have Child Scientology is making an extremely bad error in thinking and in semantics.

Significantly, camping out, hiking, hobbies, and excellent and personable group leaders have obtained results similar to these, down through the ages. But one does not classify these as psychotherapy. What we have done in Scientology is render available to those in authority over groups of children the means of procuring results of magnitude in the absence of highly personable instructors, camping out, hobbies, individual attention to the child, perfect home life, and other intensely desirable but very scarce commodities. Any expert in the field of child study can inform you that it is possible to take any child and, by giving him enough time, improve him. Parents can tell you this. Anyone, in short, could have gotten results from a child by sufficiently devoting himself to the child’s interests. When one realizes that this might consume dozens or thousands of hours per child, one sees immediately that without the fundamentals of Scientology the mass resolution of the problems of children is impossible. The question has been “How do we do it without devoting this special time to each and every child, since it is not possible to devote that time?” The answer, of course, lies in the fact that a group of 30 or 500 children simultaneously can be given Child Scientology by one untrained person, and that these children will accrue the various gains to be realized in the past only by individual address and interest.

What is the process given to groups of children?

Taking a copy of Self Analysis in Scientology, the instructor, the Scientologist, the scout leader, or other person, delivers to the assembled group imaginary scenes to envision. The children envision these scenes, one after another.

The imaginary scenes are taken from the lists found in Self Analysis in Scientology. They are selected and re-formed from these lists in accordance with the ability of the children to understand them.

This process is continued for about 20 minutes per day. It may be continued for as short a time as three weeks for any group of children with excellent results, but, more optimumly, may be incorporated permanently into their routine activities.

The Scientologist will discover in his first session that the children in the group divide roughly into three classes: (1) those who cannot get any mock-ups at all, (2) those who get them too fast or too slow, and (3) those who get them well. He divides his group into three sections. He gives processing — as described above — to each of the sections, processing those who cannot get mock-ups the most, and processing those who are too fast or too slow slightly more than the third group, which is given the continued routine processing. Ordinarily, it will be found that the three groups will assume a parity in a short time, and so can be continued as one group.

The person delivering the lists must know that he should not give special attention to individuals in the group simply because these individuals are having trouble, for this would mean to each child in the group that he or she would have to have trouble so as to get individual attention.

The instructor must also know that the children often become quite active, dramatic, and emotional when they do this process, for they find it a great deal of sport, and, in the case of a school, he should be prepared to have complaints from adjoining rooms, should he be so unwise as not to arrange for a suitable period of the day for processing.

The instructor or Scientologist should know that a child will occasionally “boil off.” This, as a manifestation of unconsciousness, is very mild, and simply means that some period of the child’s life wherein he was unconscious has been slightly restimulated. He should know that all he has to do to arouse the child from this state is to have him remember something that is real to him, a time when he was in good communication with somebody, and a time when he felt that somebody loved him.

The person applying the lists should also know that he should not rebuke, criticize, evaluate, or tease the children because of their mock-ups or their troubles with them. He should also know that he must not evaluate these mock-ups or try to interpret them as dreams, since whatever relationship they may have to dreams and regardless of how fascinating they may be, their interpretation will reduce the effectiveness and ability of the child. In fact, their evaluation for the child is actually destructive to his pride and beingness, and such interpretation not only has no part in his processing but is expressly forbidden as being intensely harmful.

What else can be expected immediately? A small percentage of the children will not respond at all. A small percentage will become worried because of the activities and noise of the other children. A small percentage will be unchanged, though responsive. The remaining 75 or 85 percent will advance variously in their intelligence quotients, their behaviors, and their personal abilities (in particular, their ability to learn).

By experience, no disabilities will occur because of this process, excepting those which are occasioned by sudden upsets in home life or by reason of teasing or evaluation on the part of an applicator.

By all standard tests of learning ability, reading skill, differentiation, and so forth, it will be discovered that the group, as a group, has progressed very far beyond what anyone has ever had the right to expect from the application of any form of child improvement. This should not be labelled a wild claim; it is rather a sober fact which is based upon very wide, careful testing and observation under many differing conditions, under many types of instructors, and under many groups of children.

Quite incidentally, and certainly of no great interest except that it makes good telling, psychosomatic difficulties, perception inhibitions (such as stuttering), and various other disabilities, the correction of which is classed entirely in the field of psychotherapy, have a tendency to deintensify or disappear in the child who is part of a group undergoing this processing. Such improvements — no matter how dramatic they may be — are not the reason why this processing is given to the group, but instead are simply an added bonus, and entirely a by-product. Indeed, it is a rather grim joke that Scientology so employed and without direction toward the release of such ills, does rather routinely what medicine has been unable to do. It is of no great concern to the Scientologist that this happens. Certainly, he does not want to prevent it from happening, but he must not lose sight of the fact that he is not processing a group to make it happen. He will be given his greatest thanks as a result of such cases and his benefits will be measured by them, but this should not turn his head from the main goal of the process, which is to make a group of able children far more able. Parents, for instance, who have spent thousands of dollars on little Johnny’s asthma, discover one day, after he has been part of such a group for some time, that he is no longer troubled with asthma. Further, it is doubtful if he will ever be troubled with asthma again. Parents presented with such evidence have a tendency either to become angry or to be grateful, depending upon their level of sanity.

The group auditor is not there to cure, heal, repair, patch up, treat, advise, counsel, or otherwise to mend children. By definition, the group auditor is one who works to create a new state of beingness in a group of people by the administration of lists prepared by the H. A. S. or himself. It should be clearly understood that we are attempting something which has never happened before. We are achieving a state in people which has not previously existed. We are taking another step forward with Man. We are not trying to bring children back to normal, nor are we trying to remedy existing conditions. We are factually striking out to attain a level of culture and civilization higher than those attained before, in which we include any period of any nation anywhere. The group auditor has about as much relationship to psychotherapy as a stonemason at work on a new city has to the proprietor of a junkyard. The group auditor is not working to return children to normal. They have never been other than they are and, in the absence of what we know now, never could have been what we hope them to be. People who try to classify the group auditor as one who is making children normal by treating them are actually insulting the group auditor. In the absence of Scientology, or whatever it would have been called had it been discovered in the past or future, such repair work was the best that could be done. The attainment of gains by the eradication of something differs considerably from the attainment of gains by the creation of something. All processing in Scientology today is positive-gain processing and is, in fact, creative; the work of the auditor is creative whether he is working on an individual or a group.

The special problems of individual children which confront the group auditor should be referred by him to a professional auditor, or handled by himself as a professional auditor providing he is trained in that capacity. Therefore, parents or interested persons desiring special consideration for individual problems should be directed elsewhere by the group auditor. The group auditor’s interest is in terms of mass production. He is creating with his work a new state of beingness, a new type of childhood.

This is a state that is desirable not simply because it contrasts with former states, but desirable because it means a better civilization or perhaps one might say, a civilization.

What theory underlies this? The group auditor needs no more theory than that contained in this article and in Self Analysis in Scientology to succeed in his work. Indeed, he need not even have a solid grip on that much theory for the process to work for him. However, in the absence of background data, many things may strike him as strange or unexplained, and, lacking the data, he may believe himself to be dealing with an imprecise thing and so wander off course. Thus, the best group auditor would be the one who is best founded in theory and who is a professional auditor as well. The next-best group auditor would be one who has studied this article and Self Analysis in Scientology and who has attended the tape-recorded lecture course consisting of six hours of lectures on this subject, which is available at the H. A. S. , at associate offices, or as reels from the Publications Section of the H. A. S.

Although this is apparently very simple — that we just get a child to imagine something and the child is then better — and although people will occasionally try to tell the group auditor that it has been long known that creative imagination plays a considerable role in the life of the child, yet mock-up processing from prepared lists is based upon fundamental precisions which are quite invariable.

With much too much simplicity, it can be stated that here the imagination is being utilized in such a way as to bring it under the control, direction, and self- discipline of the child. The knowledge that we are not actually dealing with imagination as it has been classified in the past, and that in reality we are dealing with quite another function — namely, clarification of the role of imagination — at least makes one feel himself conversant with what is happening.

In mathematics, even in that pallid thing called arithmetic, it is necessary to observe and realize the existence of a problem and the factors of the problem, and to combine these to predict an answer. In the entire field of life, it is imagination which delivers answers. If one cannot imagine he cannot predict. The factors of life are more complex than the factors of arithmetic, but they do not differ so far as mental functioning is concerned. There are simply many more of them. One can teach a child by rote that two plus two equals four, but many an instructor and many a parent with the fondest hopes for the future of a child have, after the child’s education was complete, discovered that the child either cannot or will not utilize the data to resolve problems in his own existence. In such a child, the ability to imagine the answer by recombining existing factors has not been developed or disciplined. Many an engineering school has been embarrassed by turning forth honor graduates who yet failed dismally in the reduction of rudimentary practical problems to workable solutions. Even a thing as apparently precise as mathematics yet requires, in the good mathematician, an enormous amount of imagination. In general, symbols and figures, statistics and data, serve only to assist the functioning of the mind in a solution of problems. These are at best crutches to be utilized by an active intelligence. The mind is always the servo-mechanism of mathematics, a thing which even the better mathematicians are apt to overlook. Thus, when we are trying to teach a child, whether to be proficient in geometry or in handling his body, we must teach him as well to predict a future state of beingness; if he cannot predict a future state of beingness, he cannot resolve problems. As a statement, the phrase “prediction of a future state of beingness” almost encompasses the function of the human mind. Prediction of beingness is somewhat different from simple prediction. It is not necessary to have pictures to tell one what is going to happen, but it is necessary to have the potentiality of imagining what is going to happen to accurately assess a situation.

Thus, it may be seen that the inhibition of the imagination of a child directly results in the inhibition of the child’s ability to resolve problems relating to his own environment and his own life. This nullification of imagination should not exist; however, the individual should be able to utilize this imagination, and the imagination should be under the discipline of the individual. A good instructor realizes that it is the discipline of the student’s mind by the student himself which accrues to the student the benefits of education.

The discipline of the imagination is essential in any learning process. The infant and the child are peculiarly prone to utilize their imaginations in such a way as to make their imaginations utilize them. Their imaginations are not wild; they are simply not founded upon fact and are not correlated with the existing state of affairs. At night, the child is hounded by nightmares and delusions; by day his imagination conjures up for him images based upon factual and unimportant data of his environment which frighten and inhibit him. He is given to believe, then, that there is some hidden thing in his vicinity which is inhibitive to his further survival. Delusion is imagination out of control. The control and discipline of imagination and its employment for the artistic and practical gains of the individual would be the highest goal of a training process. There have been great instructors in the past, great teachers who could lead their students forward by their own personal magnetism. Their effort was centered upon giving the student into his own hands, and this was accomplished by causing the student to desire to discipline his own beingness. However, the discipline of beingness is not necessarily the limitation of beingness. It is better to be able to decide and control a few things to be, than to be under the whip of an imagination which drives one to be a great many things, none of which are under one’s control. These processes, then, aim directly towards disciplining the imagination and bringing it under the control of the individual child.

Throughout the day, and every day of his life, the child is told that things do not belong to him. If he is given a pair of shoes, he is informed that they are not his shoes by the first command from the parent that he polish them. In the case of nearly all children, even though they seem to have possessions, they themselves do not believe themselves to own anything. Their bodies, their minds, their toys, their clothes, their habits, their mannerisms, and their likes and dislikes, are all under the continuous impact of the MEST universe and other intelligences. There is something, however, which a child can own — an image which he creates himself. In fact, he will only attain to those images which he does create for himself, because, in his opinion, any attempt to reach images created for him by others (particularly by duress) is antipathetic to his survival. At every hand he is driven from possession and driven from beingness, for the child can possess only those things which he feels free to be.

The creation and control of mental images performs another function in that it utilizes and disciplines energy. In creating mental images which he then controls, the child discovers first that he can own something, next that he can control something, next that here is something he is free to be, and next that he has control over mental functions. Dignity and purpose are native to the child; badness and uncontrol are not. Thus, by envisioning images the child comes into possession of his own beingness and is convinced that he is free to be something. The change which comes with this realization is not an ultimate or absolute thing, for there is a gradient scale of beingness and there are always new heights above any last plateau reached. This is a gradual and continuous process, this creation of beingnesses (or, symbologically, mock-ups), and the process continues in any phase of life so long as the person has life in him. The direct attack on this problem by the use of mock-up processing results as one would expect; it brings the child under his own discipline and makes him capable of being what he wants to be, not what he is forced to be. At the same time, it renders him less reactive toward disciplinary actions undertaken for his own good and toward educational measures which are provided for his future security. Acceptance will be found to replace resentment of education.

The goal of an instructor is to instruct. There is an old story about the Rough Riders, a regiment in the Spanish-American War. Their most famous exploit was the taking of San Juan Hill, yet there is an incident in this which is worthy of our notice. The orders of the day were posted and stated explicitly that they were to “jump off” from El Caney at five o’clock the following morning and were to take San Juan Hill.

The Rough Riders awoke at 4:30 a.m. to discover that one small thing had been omitted from their plans: they had, as yet, to take El Caney. Thus, before they could execute their orders they had to assault and take another objective, which they did take with severe losses, and from which they finally carried out the main assault, many hours overdue, again with enormous casualties. Thus it is that a military organization can suffer frightfully from trying to fight one battle when another has to be fought first. The instructor is supposed to educate children, the camp leader is supposed to entertain them, and the hospital nurse is supposed to make them well. Yet, standing as an obstacle before each one of these and any other individuals attempting to handle children, is, in actuality, the lack of a child. Bluntly, the child is not there. He is sitting in the classroom but his mind is elsewhere. He is in the hospital as a body, but is maundering about the scene of the accident which sent him there. He is supposed to be having a good time in camp, yet he is actually at home playing with his dog. Any attempt to work with a child is an attempt to contact and get into communication with the child. Unless one can get into communication with the child he cannot perform his duties as pertain to that child.

The task of communicating with a child does not begin with talking to the child. It begins with finding a child to talk to. There are many tricks which lead a child’s interest sufficiently into present time to allow one to communicate with him. Anyone dealing with children knows that this is the primary problem in that task. But it is a very terrible strain trying to maintain the child’s attention in present time while one communicates with the child. If one had a process which made it possible for the child to be in present time and to get him there easily, that process would, of course, be very welcome to the child. The group processing of children, or the use of the same process on an individual child, is a workable answer to this problem.

There is no reason to go back into the past after the child (as in psychotherapy) if one has a modus operandi to bring the child into the present. You certainly would not actively go after things which easily came to you. Application of these lists in this fashion to groups of children brings them into present time, and thus to their instructor or leader. Consequently, once he has used it, an instructor finds this processing as necessary a part of classroom activity as ringing the school bell. It is one thing to get the body into class; it is another thing to get the mind into class. The instructor is being paid to instruct, but before he can instruct there must be somebody there to be instructed. This is terribly elementary, but it is a problem which has been overlooked, and it is a problem which, in many cases, has made education an arduous process. Children in present time are very easy to look after, very easy to instruct, and very easy to live with. Children out of present time, bent on revenge, and fresh from a quarrelsome breakfast table in an antipathetic home, form a noisy and rebellious group. The behavior of a child out of present time is not easily predicted, and this unpredictability is a considerable strain to the child’s leader. A child out of present time walks off the curb into heavy traffic, falls down fire escapes, gets hit with gymnasium equipment, hurts himself in games, and causes those multitudes of upsets which make the life of a child shepherd an onerous one, at times.

The problem of the parent in the home is no different from the problems of the instructor. The continual nag-nag-nag necessary with children is occasioned solely by two things: one is that the child has no real understanding of his role (for it has never been explained to him) and so has no beingness in the house as part of the family, part of an economic unit, or part of a work team; and the other is that the child is not there. The more one corrects and punishes the child, the less the child is there, since, in essence, correction is “go back into the past and pick up punishment data to remind you that the future is going to be unpleasant.” The process of mocking up is peculiarly suited to children, for in the main they possess brilliant ability. An adult preclear is filled with envy at the ability of a child to obtain mock-ups and control them.