In either case, however, it was the heart of American academia that held Ron’s next lesson, and specifically George Washington University. He matriculated in the fall of 1930, after completing an interrupted high-school education in the space of about nine months. His declared major, at his father’s insistence, was engineering. Although, in fact, he had already decided upon a literary career and was, besides, now very deeply immersed in research that would culminate in Dianetics and Scientology.
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From the outset, George Washington University failed to impress him. He objected to instructors addressing students as, “You!” or more formally, “Hey, you!” He objected to a veritable “cult of mathematics” within the engineering department, and otherwise resented the emphasis on form as opposed to practicality. Moreover, as that first semester progressed and he drew a closer look – Ron would soon serve as president of his engineering fraternity – the view grew even bleaker. A “zero-zero world,” he termed it in a later letter, and elsewhere spoke of a classmate expelled from the “saintly and sanctified” halls for publishing a campus newspaper article alleging university football stars to be illegal professionals (which was true). Eventually, however, and more to the point of the larger story, he came to focus upon the philosophic source of the problem, or what he would finally describe as the hidden curriculum within twentieth-century classrooms.
The issues are complex, and actually bear upon the whole shape of modern education as defined by educational psychologists John Dewey and Edward L. Thorndike. Ostensibly, their proposal was an advancement, and involved a messianic view of the school, not simply as a place of learning, but an institution for social adjustment... Or as Thorndike himself so firmly put it, “for controlling human nature and changing it to the advantage of the commonweal.” Central to the doctrine lay an equally messianic vision of society as a grandly ordered colony wherein each subordinates to the whole according to his talents. Those who would see parallels to communism or national socialism for that matter, are correct. The roots are ultimately the same, i.e., German psychology and particularly Wilhelm Wundt of the Leipzig school. But in either case, it was a constrained view, literally a spiritless vision of the human being as the sum of his evolutionary parts. Thus, as Dewey maintained, if we are naturally social animals, it is simply because our evolutionary forebears naturally ran with the pack. While if, as Thorndike added, we also required molding to a civilized status, it is because we are not naturally civilized at all... and therein lay the rub, for suddenly, and quite universally, the psychological shaping of a child was deemed far more important than the teaching of any traditional subject – be it reading, writing or arithmetic.
There is far more to this creed, of course, including a Thorndike proposal that children are best not even taught formal tools before the age of six, but rather educated only according to psychological priorities – which, in turn, opened the door to still more psychobabble on behavioral incentives, sensorimotor development and symbolic recognition. At the core of it all, however, lay an intriguing little model drawn from the behavioral school, and specifically from the Wundtian offshoot of Pavlov.
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Although never to embrace a single word of it, LRH offers as concise an explanation as any. One afternoon, on the trail of that extracurricular research to culminate in Dianetics, he entered the George Washington University psychology department, then headed by a Dr. Fred Moss (infamous among students for absurdly devious trick questions). There, Ron found the typical stock of white laboratory rats running a maze for bits of cheese. When he inquired as to the point, he was provided with that classic behaviorist theory so thoroughly adopted by the Dewey-Thorndike school. (Dewey himself was among the first to conduct such experimentation.) That is, notwithstanding human intellectual capacity, we may still be defined in terms of the lower life forms from whence we evolved. Thus, just as the adolescent rat best runs its maze with the right combination of reward and punishment, so, too, does the adolescent human... Except, of course, in human terms the maze becomes our educational system and rewards are generally less obvious than cheese pellets.
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