Article by L. Ron Hubbard

If you denied men the bulk of the solid objects they were used to, if you made them stay indoors when they should be outdoors, you would see deterioration in their character. You would reduce their sense of owning or possessing things and/or spaces. Does that make sense to you?

The old-timer spent most of his time out in the park or riding around. He got outside. He was able to live in the world, not in a house or an office or at a machine. He lived in the world! The world consisted of fields and valleys and rivers and mountains. That was the world. It consisted of rather boisterous weather; it consisted of a lot of things. He felt like he owned things and spaces; he had solid objects! He had not yet learned to be afraid of them! Therefore, he could solve things, he could write things like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence without a qualm. It didn’t upset him at all. And he could then afford, when he did spend some time working on something, to really work at it; not work at working at it. He could learn fast.

His sense of owning spaces and objects was up because he had the whole wide world, as much of the whole wide world as he could look at within a lot of walking in any direction. He had more world than the airline pilot who is skipping back and forth between London and New York. That fellow doesn’t have world; he has distances.

This might apply to education in a very interesting way. Supposing we had a classroom in which a child had to spend five, six, seven hours a day grinding away and he never got outside? We would suppose that with that much study he’d learn something. But we see by experience that the more time a child spends inside, the less he learns. There is something wrong here, then, with education.

L. Ron Hubbard – 1956