Solutions to Education
“Today’s children will become tomorrow’s civilization.” —LRH
As early as 1950, L. Ron Hubbard warned that any lapse in the quality of education would severely impact on the quality of life. In particular and most incisively:
“The end and goal of any society, as it addresses the problem of education, is to raise the ability, the initiative and the cultural level and, with all these, the survival level of that society. And when a society forgets any one of these things, it is destroying itself by its own educational mediums.”
Decades later, Mr. Hubbard’s observation has proven nightmarishly accurate and continued disintegration of social infrastructures may well prove inevitable unless the deterioration of educational systems is arrested. To cite but a few disturbing facts: over 45 percent of all students leaving or graduating high school lack necessary reading and writing skills intrinsic to daily living; the American high-school dropout rate hovers at approximately 30 percent across inner-city areas; while according to the president of a teachers’ association, up to 50 percent of all new instructors quit the profession within the first five years, in part owing to implied threats of bodily harm; and Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of American students have sunk to levels considerably lower than those achieved by students just a few decades earlier.
Elsewhere across the Western world, the numbers are scarcely more encouraging. A British government study reported that a quarter of the English workforce is unable to add the menu prices of a hamburger, French fries, apple pie and coffee. Moreover, one out of five British students could not correctly locate Great Britain on a world map. All told, these dismal figures translate into a depressing economic scenario with annual costs to businesses in lost production and re-education now touching the $250 billion mark. Moreover, when one factors in the grim links between illiteracy and criminality, world educational failures become too bleak to tally.
