Since 1987, the Church of Scientology has warned that the drugging of our children is spiralling out of control. In March 2003, the U.S. House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 425-1, the Child Medication Safety Act, which prohibits schools from requiring students to take medication as a prerequisite to school admittance.

The ability to learn is crucial to the full development of an individual, and effective education is vital to promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among people of all nations and for the maintenance of peace.

To make the right to an education a reality, Scientology’s founder L. Ron Hubbard researched and developed educational methods capable of transforming today’s alarmingly widespread illiteracy into new vistas of opportunity.

Mr. Hubbard’s interest in education dated from his early years. At age sixteen, he accepted a mid-term position as an English instructor on the island of Guam. He continued to embrace the subject of education throughout his life, isolating the exact barriers to learning and developing methods to overcome them.

Today, programmes using Mr. Hubbard’s educational discoveries reach across five continents — from the inner cities, to the highest halls of learning, and into schools where entire curriculums are devoted to these methods. Since these techniques have application for anyone who studies and learns, Scientologists have made them available to the public through Applied Scholastics International. Applied Scholastics programmes are used by tens of thousands of educators in 54 nations. Applied Scholastics has delivered seminars and training courses to more than 63,000 teachers, who have in turn trained 3.4 million students in the use of these educational methods.

Among the most dramatic results in this regard are found in Africa. In the 1960s, L. Ron Hubbard visited the southern African nation then called Rhodesia, at the time ruled by Ian Smith’s white minority. Consistent with his belief that the majority black populations of southern Africa had a right to a government for all the people, Mr. Hubbard drafted and proposed a new constitution based on the principle of equal rights for all southern Africans. He also spoke in favour of empowering blacks with education. Needless to say, this did not endear him to Smith’s all-white government. When officials discovered that he was also teaching native students the tools for literacy he had developed, the government decided he had gone too far and refused to renew his visa. In point of fact, their fears were justified. What he stood and fought for was, indeed, nothing less than the awakening of the African people to education and freedom. Thus he was thoroughly gratified when, a decade later, his educational tools were introduced into native schools for the benefit of some two million black African children.

Word of mouth about the effectiveness of Applied Scholastics’ programmes has since spread to other nations on the African continent that today are contending with illiteracy in their populations. The Gambia’s Education Minister, herself an educator and graduate of Harvard University, launched a programme in 2001 to bring Mr. Hubbard’s educational discoveries to all schools in that nation. To make it a reality, her Ministry trained all 6,000 of the country’s teachers in Mr. Hubbard’s Study Technology. The results, in the words of the Education Minister, were “unprecedented.” In July 2003, at the opening of the new international Applied Scholastics Centre, she described what had been accomplished:

“The quality of education in our country is now accelerating. We are flooded with teacher accolades: Many reported ‘D’ students becoming ‘A’ students, slow learners learning quickly and, most important and crucial, our children are now experiencing the true joy of learning.”

These stories repeat themselves wherever Mr. Hubbard’s discoveries are applied: In Italy, where a national training centre uses the study technology to prepare students for the police academy; in the Philippines, where Applied Scholastics centres are helping children out of a life on the streets by educating them; in the ravaged inner cities of America, where tutoring programmes are accelerating student literacy levels by several grades; and in schools throughout the world from Copenhagen to Sydney.