Education and Competence

If you denied men the bulk of the solids they were used to, if you made them stay indoors when they should be outdoors, you would see a deterioration in their character. You would reduce their havingness.* Does that make sense to you?

In other words, the old-timer spent most of his time out in the park or riding around. There wasn't anything to do inside anyhow, you didn't have much in the way of electric lights. You just had a candle and they were expensive and so on. But he managed to do things at night I am told. I remember.

Anyhow, he got outside. He was able to live in the world, not in a house or an office or at the playing table of 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 had havingness, he had solid objects! He had not yet learned to be afraid of them! And therefore he could solve things, he could write things like the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence without a qualm. It didn't upset him at all. And he could 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 havingness 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 any airline pilot who is skipping back and forth between London and New York. That fellow doesn't have world, he has distance.

Now, if this is a salient factor, it 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 he spends inside evidently over a certain ratio the less he learns. There is something very wrong here then with education.

L. Ron Hubbard, "Application of Games Principles"

* Havingness: the feeling that one owns or possesses.

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