The third dynamic called education, when engaged upon the installation of false or imagined premises, can be quite aberrative. The only right we have to train in Scientology is that we are training people in things which they already know. The principles and axioms of Scientology are considerations which have been agreed upon and out of which stem this universe and livingness. To train a person in these trains him only to handle this universe and livingness, therefore Scientology training is nonaberrative. On the contrary, thorough training in Scientology is in itself, if a slow one, a road to Clear.

The very fact that we are training people in things which they already know brings us to a liability, however. As we train we restimulate considerations already undertaken in some distant past by the student. As many of these were assumed to remedy ills and evils he imagined he had (the restimulation of earlier postulates he has made — which are the postulates which become the axioms and other materials in Scientology), the student may experience somatics and confusions which he would not experience in ordinary scholastic pursuits. Even though this is all for the better a student sometimes conceives himself to be under duress, either in student auditing sessions or from an instructor, which is not actually present. There are three ways in which this single liability is overcome.

First, we train a student thoroughly until the somatic or confusion is discharged. We do not give up training in something simply because he finds it confusing or painful. Just as in an auditing session we would continue to run the process to discharge the somatic which the same process turned on, so in training we continue to train in the area which has been restimulated.

Second, we train vigorously and emphatically so that there will be no confusion in the student’s mind as to the source of the training, and Third, we consider a student always as an auditor, never as a preclear. We are not at all interested in the student as a case. We are interested in the student only as a Scientologist. The moment he joins a course of training, he is considered from that moment on an auditor. When he is being audited he is, of course, for that time a preclear, but only by assignment. That he does experience case gains is entirely incidental to training. It is a maxim of Scientology instructors that if a mirror held to a student’s lips shows the mist of breath, the student is in shape to audit a preclear. There is no compromise with this state of mind. Only an instructor who intended actual harm to students would use sympathy for a student concerning his case. Therefore, Scientology Academies are looked upon as “tough schools.” Just the fact of living through a course of training merits the designation Scientologist.

The goal of training from the viewpoint of the Director of Training of the Academy is to bring the student up to a level where he could be safely entrusted with a Hubbard Guidance Center preclear. This does not mean that the student will be so entrusted, but before the Director of Training and the Examiner and the Board of Review pass the student as graduated, they have to be sure to their own complete satisfaction that they would have no qualm entrusting a difficult case to this student. This training goal insures an orientation point and standard of excellence. The instructors, the Director of Training, the Examiner and the HCO Board of Review know what I demand of a staff auditor.

Thoroughness of training is achieved on a gradient scale. It might frighten a student to look across the training chart and realize what he must be able to perform, but it should not if he realizes that he is climbing a stairway of rather easy steps. The steps are each one of them easy and their gradient has been planned and experienced carefully. Therefore, no student is ever passed to the next step of these many steps before the instructor is entirely certain that he has mastered the last step.

For example, on this gradient scale a student who has thoroughly learned Dummy Auditing Step A (“Dear Alice”), will have very little trouble graduating up to the top of the step, “Tone 40 on an Object.” While it would be a mistake to demand in Dummy Auditing Step A, the excellence necessary to pass “Tone 40 on an Object,” it is nevertheless true that those people who had difficulty with “Tone 40 on an Object” need a review of Dummy Auditing Step A.

Therefore, an instructor is always niggardly with his signature at the end of each step. To permit a student to climb too swiftly would be to condemn him to a confusion in some later area of training.

Training in Scientology contains no thought for explaining to some student how Scientology fits into some other frame of reference. By straightly teaching him Scientology he will come at last to see that it does not fit into any other frame of reference but other things fit into its frame of reference.

A great many things in Scientology have been said before. Indeed, everything in Scientology has been directly and actively postulated by the person being trained at some point in the past. It would be odd indeed if these points then did not echo or harmonic or crop up in other teachings elsewhere. It should be understood by the student that all things proceed from postulates and that these postulates go from simplicities to complexities. Therefore, it would be surprising if Tibetan Lamaism did not contain some of the data of Scientology. By working entirely with the data which is simplest and earliest one does the odd thing with Scientology of taking a new, freshly born science and undercutting any older philosophy. If Scientology is not found to do this in some field of human experience then it simply means we will have to do some more studying. But before we in the development of Scientology do more studying we should be very sure that we know enough Scientology to apply it to this apparently random field.

Scientology contains several logics which are very important to training. These are actually the logics of education. Calling your attention to one of these, it will be seen that the evaluation of the importance of a datum is often more important than the datum itself. The datum found in Scientology may also be found in other philosophic works. But hold on for a moment. Did the other philosophic work give an evaluation of the importance of the datum or did it give dozens of other data as having equal rank? This point is mentioned here because it is often overlooked by students. Scientology, for instance, has some abrupt, sharp things to say about Time. Indeed, Time could be said to be the single source of human aberration. The hunger for a number of incidents to occur simultaneously will in itself cause people to jam their time tracks. These people, of course, are not aware of the amount of incident and as a result jam many adventures into present time with a consequent disability of differentiation.

Now it will be seen that in many philosophies Time is covered exhaustively. Time is given many definitions. Time is given chapters and volumes but nowhere in these chapters and volumes does the philosopher place his finger squarely upon the two or three important data which are most important about Time. He ranks these data with all of the other data and so loses them in an ocean of drops of water, all the drops looking the same as all the other drops. Thus, truth becomes submerged in an ocean of outflow. Scientology is more parsimonious. It is more incisive, it is more thoroughly evaluated. The two or three data in Scientology which concern Time are the data from which all other data about Time flow.

Thus, when a student is taught a datum from Scientology, he is taught it with the understanding that it will clarify many other later and more complicated data. Thus, he is taught the simple datum thoroughly. Thus, he is taught fundamentals far more thoroughly than he believes necessary. The work in the development of Scientology has been the culling of truth from an ocean of fact and finding that the truth has a tiny group of data possessed of the overwhelming power of changing all other facts in this universe and in livingness.

This is the power of Scientology: that it, by stressing single, simple truths, eliminates oceans of mere data. Thus in training we concentrate solidly and continually upon these small truths and we are impatient with excursions until we have established these fundamentals as fundamentals with our students.