To continue with how we use this factor of learning rate and learning lag and so forth. You can interest an industrialist by telling him that it is learning rate that is impeding his own operation. How many instructions has he put out that have not been followed? You can say that these people really do want to cooperate with him but that the learning rate is so poor that these people cannot absorb the instructions. This is the stable datum — something he will understand — a better stable datum than anyone else will ever give him. “Labor is all bad” is the usual stable datum given to him. You will explain to him the trouble with his executives and foremen, etc., the reason why his production curve is down, or his machinery busted up, etc., is entirely because the learning rate varies from person to person. You can remind him of the stupid child and the bright child in the same classroom — one child doesn’t learn as much as the other simply because it takes one child too long to learn what the other child learns rapidly. But it is learning rate; it isn’t learning quantity. Now you get very technical at this point and explain the difference between these two children is the learning rate.

Do not go into quantity — but he will assume at once that the length of time it takes somebody to learn something establishes then how much he knows. That is not quite true, but it is awfully convincing. You can say to him, “Now actually there are not thirty people, Mr. Industrialist, in the thousands in your plant, who are really the cause of your labor difficulties. Certainly not more than thirty. These people are against you because they don’t know you.” Immediately he will say, “That is so true.” You continue, “They don’t know you because their learning rate is so poor that they have no idea what you are trying to do or what you want them to do. They are merely in revolt and they don’t know against what.” This will make sense to the industrialist. You tell him, “Now, I could pick these people out with the greatest of ease.” You could do this through the use of Personality Analysis tests which should make it quite clear to you, and he could check these against their service records, and you can be quite sure that the records would agree with your analysis. He will wonder how you could establish their learning rate so rapidly when you didn’t even talk to these people. Just use “learning rate” as a substitute conversationally for aberration, comm lag, etc., and it translates. So we are in communication with him even if it is a bit of a stretch. We are in communication.

I’ll give you an example. A stupid judge is one who can’t learn the rights and wrongs, the in’s and out’s, from the witnesses, and all the attorneys will tell you at once that this man is a stupid judge because his decisions are incorrect. But sometimes they take a person who is simply a stupid judge and they say he is a vicious judge, but actually you could say his difficulty in learning is so great that he becomes emotionally disturbed at the thought of learning and therefore exerts punishment in revenge on the people who have brought this torture upon him. His learning faculties are so poor that it becomes painful for him to learn.

You see how you could just talk to somebody and without accusing anybody of being insane or aberrated, etc., you could probably sell him processing for the whole of his executive and foremen levels of his staff to increase their learning rate. And the reason for this? So that his postulates will stick; that is, what he can see will happen. But this is not what you do.

At this point, you have a point of agreement and you as a Scientologist take departure from it. You have made a point of agreement that it is learning rate and learning lag that causes randomity on his communication lines. You can tell him this and convince him because it is almost true, and it is certainly true within the realm of his experience. But you, in actually processing people, depart from it. You’re not interested exclusively in the employer’s postulates sticking. You’re not interested at all in this. You are interested in giving the person determinism over data. You’re not interested in a person’s learning rate really, but in his power of choice to establish or review the importance of data. This is what you re-establish with the person. You don’t teach him, then, to get into a state of hypnotic impulse; you teach him power of choice over data, and only then will the data become of use to him, and then only can he become social in his behavior.

The answer to the question is in total disagreement with the industrialist’s modus operandi. It is not in agreement at all. I have talked to some of these boys within the last year, and it is quite interesting that the moment I started to establish the fluidity and the right to think for labor, the right to live, and the right to be for labor, we were talking on different planets, and this is the secret of their failure. If their system of money control was a successful system there would be more of it today than there is, and it would be an increasing system, and it is not. It is a decreasing system. They must have a short glance at something, but you’re not going to involve yourself with this short glance. Management will buy learning rate completely. They will buy this whole thing because they themselves cannot face communication, but they can face learning. Communication is too high for them, and we have tried to sell them this for several years. It is too high for them because you are trying to make them face a Static. They will not do this, but they will, however, face learning rate.

So what do you tell them, knowing this full well? You say you are going to increase the learning rate of their staff members. You don’t discuss technically how you do it. You just give him wonderful examples, e.g., ask how long it takes a person to learn to use one of his machines well. He may say it needs an apprenticeship of five years. Then you can reply, what a long time, obviously due to the very slow learning rate. Then ask him, how does he know the man can really run the machine — ask him about his repair and maintenance bill. You can tell him that certainly, he, personally, knows about these machines, but that is why he is sitting at the top in an administrative post. But what about these other people? How does he know that they know?

Take the junior executive who is not very effective, doesn’t get things done. His learning rate is so poor that he doesn’t understand what his employer wants done. It could be that he is very willing to do anything for him, but he never finds out what. Now let’s have a conference with this employee and see if this is the case. And sure enough, it always is the case. If you’re dealing with somebody who can’t get things done, you are for sure dealing with someone who cannot absorb data. And you just prove it by getting into communication without mentioning communication. You will talk about learning rate and learning lag. I’ve tried this out and found that you can do wonders with it in ordinary conversation.

The definition of you, as a Scientologist, in such a circumstance would be someone who decreases the learning lag of people — increases their speed of assimilation of data. This is how you could describe your job. You can talk about reaction time and the vast amount of data that the environment demands of people, etc. Take a professional football team; one of the most difficult things here is that they have to learn new plays all the time. What if they have a good player who cannot learn new plays and always uses the old ones? That is where they lose their games. Well, what do we do? We speed up the ability of learning new plays. Now you can really start to get technical. You have some agreement here, your listener has not yet begun to suspect that you can do something for him, but that will be a matter of just a short time.

Learning rate is important to the truck driver. He has to learn that there is a truck in front of him on the road before he can put his brakes on. Now, suppose it takes him a long time to learn this — he has a wreck. So people with low learning rates are accident prone. Your job as a Scientologist is to make sure that people have fast reaction time by increasing their learning rate. But do not forget that this is purely a method of obtaining agreement and introducing your subject — it is not an end in itself.

This occupies a fairly interesting section in Scientology, but its accomplishment is not effected by direct drill. This is never done. Why did it take people nine months to learn to recognize an aircraft in 1/1 25th of a second on the aircraft recognition courses? Because it was done by drill and the recognition officer very, very often was not so good at recognizing planes. But increasing learning rate by drill, etc., usually only increases familiarity and automaticity.

Learning rate governs reading time. There are many systems which speed up your reading time, but the practice of reading or the practice of acting simply increases the familiarity with what you are doing to a point where you can neglect it, and that is never the goal of a Scientologist. His goal is not to get something more automatic, his goal is to establish or re-establish power of choice over data.

A totally fixed datum is in the past. Where would a person have to go to recover it? In the past, of course. A person, to stay in present time, has to have all his data in a relatively fluid condition, so the re-establishment of the power of choice over data — to be able to accept it or reject it at will — comes first, and the whole process of increasing learning rate, which is a secondary thing, is the process of recovering power of choice over data.

All education is trying to do is fix data and all Scientology is trying to do is fix or unfix it at will. This is what a Scientologist is doing and that is the goal of the processes used, and incidentally, they are the only things that will increase learning rate and cut down learning lag and increase reaction time, etc.

But the final product in the framework of the society itself is actually coming from something else than the society believes it is coming from. Now anybody will happily let you come in and teach or process a person as much as you please about his job if they think this is the drill to increase his learning rate, and so you have freedom to process people. But what you are doing, is re-establishing his power of choice over the data he has. He always then winds up knowing more about it, and his learning rate depends upon that power of choice to fix or unfix data at will, and some processes which I will be giving you in future PABs will be aimed at doing this very precisely.