Director’s Letter

There is a lot of talk, media and bills being proposed about saving our children, giving them a better education and how important they are. We all know this, and so I won’t bother boring you with those same ideas. To be honest, they are getting us nowhere so far, so let’s look at something new.

I would like you to look at what is really important for our children. Is it really important they walk away from years and years of study with a piece of paper in their hands that says they are someone? Many of our children do this, every year. Does this now mean that they are self-determined individuals? Are they happy, do they really know how to succeed? Are they confident and able? Can you really tell me that the piece of paper can verify all that?

Education has been so completely lost under so many opinions, authoritarian ideas and programs from the state, that most people consider education is getting a high school diploma, or a college degree. It doesn’t seem to matter that these things do not promise happiness, the ability to succeed, the ability to be yourself and control your environment. In fact, from all I have seen, these things are actually frowned upon.

What is important to us at Mojave Academy is that the child can be self-determined, can be confident and able and happy. It is important to us that the child is learning about life and how to be successful at what that child wants to do. It is important to us that the child leaves our school with a sense of himself, or herself, and knowing that he or she is someone who can do something effective in this world.

Has anyone taken a look at the great philosophers over the times and seen that many of them had never finished their schooling? Yet those people were important, they were wise, they controlled and changed their environment, each and every one of them.

Mr. Hubbard says the following, which I think is very pertinent to my communication to you:

“Education should not be associated with scholasticism. There are men who have never seen the inside of a university who are superior to those and worth more to society than those who carried away the highest honors. Herbert Spencer spent three years at school in all his life. Spinoza spent a few years and then was expelled. Francis Bacon, the man who gave us all the fundamentals of what we call now the scientific method, went to school three years, revolted against Aristotle and left the halls of learning in a huff. Actually, as one walks down the hall of learning and looks at the busts of great, therein, he is struck by the fact that almost none were formally educated but took the world for their texts and professors. One might almost say that a professional educator in one who worships a dead illiterate. And one, with some research, might validly conclude that the surest way to succeed in any profession is to study something else at school.

“Now I have been very fortunate to know in my life quite a few geniuses—fellows that really wrote their name fairly large in the world of literature and science—and I consider myself very fortunate to have known them because they are rare. Why are they so rare? I found something peculiar about these fellows—they were taught in some YMCA school or they were taught by some Englishman who ran a little college for difficult children in the street; they were all taught—it seems—in some kind of off-breed school.” - L. Ron Hubbard

I’m going to tell you the sorry story of many kids currently making their way through life right now. They go to school because they have no choice, and if they care at all they generally work hard to get an “A”, not an understanding. The purpose at the end of the day is to achieve that “A”, yet you’ll find that even with that grade, next year they need to review it again because they never really learned it. But they need that good grade, otherwise dad will be mad, mom will be sad and the state may decide to diagnose them with some mental disease. At the end of the day, they go home and sit in front of their computer, or their cell phone, and text their friends for hours, or maybe play video games or watch TV. They don’t create, because the world is creating for them, so they are not learning to live life. The video games and TV portray a life of promiscuousness, criminality, dishonesty and low moral codes. Girls are losing their virginity at 14 these days, maybe younger, and a large percentage of middle school/junior high school students have already tried drugs.

What Mojave Academy is providing to parents at our campus in the mountains of New Mexico is a different environment, one that is safe from the ills of society, one that is clean and healthy and designed to let your child be himself. In this environment, we can teach your child how to be successful, responsible and happy in life without having to constantly battle a world around him that is telling him to be lazy, irresponsible and suicidal. While your child is here, he can learn about life, discover his own purposes and goals, obtain a High School Diploma and really get his feet solidly on the ground. Then when he goes back to the society he was in before, he has the tools to handle those previously “impossible” problems. And you will have a child that you are proud of, that you can trust and know that he will make the right decisions for himself.

That’s what we do here. I hope you take the time to find out about our school, our programs and L. Ron Hubbard’s educational philosophy and see it for yourself.

Yours,

Cheri Hall
Executive Director of Mojave Academy

Mission Statement

We live in a world with over 800 million illiterate adults, and where 4,700 kids smoke pot for the first time every day.

The average dropout rates range from 25% to 45% with the majority of those that do graduate having a reading level between the 6th and 7th grade. Violence in schools has escalated alarmingly, impacting both children and teachers.

And parents, who are the vessel that carry these children forward into the future, are hopeless as to what to do with their children.

Our mission is to provide a safe place for children to get their education so that they are not hounded by the daily problems in life that can pull them down. Instead they are able to concentrate on their studies and their purpose in life, and when leaving this school they have the data they need to be what they want in life.

In following this mission, we have discovered that many students who arrive here are still plagued with problems at home, they are not fully able to concentrate in the classroom and they are sometimes unable to socialize or get along with others.

This is where our Life Basics program came in, and through the last decade this program has been streamlined and revised until it can cover almost any problem that a child runs into that makes life hard to confront.

Now children can do the Life Basics program and learn the tools to communicate, to take responsibility, to confront hardship, to make the right decisions and so on. Only when this is mastered can study be tackled. Children love to learn. When school is no longer something that they have to do, but something that they want to do, they WILL learn.

And that is our mission.