Lectures on Education

Education and the Autonomy of Thought

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Lesson: Education and the Autonomy of Critical Thought

Genre: Speech

Track: 128

Dictation Name: RR123A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

What I propose to do this morning is to speak twice with an opportunity for some questions and discussion in between the first and the second, and after the second. I shall be dealing with two subjects from another book that I’m writing on education.

Now, this first hour, we shall deal with the subject which, by title, sounds very complex, but it’s basically a very simple problem. Education and the Autonomy of Critical Thought. Now, the modern era had its full scale beginning with the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment was characterized by a radical hatred of Christianity, and the battle cry of the Enlightenment was “erase the shame!” What was it that they saw as the shame of man, the shame of civilization? It was Christianity. It was biblical religion, and the basic and the central offense of Christianity to modern man, from the Enlightenment to the present has been its doctrine of authority.

Now, every system of thought has a doctrine of authority. So that when people tell you they don’t like Christianity because it is authoritarian, what they are actually saying is, we don’t like your brand of authoritarianism. Like prefer our own. We prefer man or the state, as the absolute authority rather than God. Thus, it was the concept of an absolute sovereign God, with absolute authority over man, who was man’s only savior and who provides man with an infallible word, that was for them the shame.

Now, the citadel of Greek thought, or Renaissance philosophy, and of the Enlightenment has been called by Peter Gay, the great historian of the Enlightenment who also is a great champion of it, simply this. The autonomy of critical thought. What does this mean? It means that when man exercises his reason as he approaches anything, and especially in the processes of education, man’s reason plays the role of God. For us, as Christians, reason is extremely important, but we believe in reason, not as God, but as reason.

A very famous Bible verse extensively used in early Medieval thought and in Reformation thinking was Isaiah 7:9, according to the Septuagint translation. “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” Now, this sums up the Christian approach. “Unless you believe, you will not understand,” because the world was not man’s creation, and therefore, for man to understand the world, he must first of all, believe in the creator and accept the creator’s interpretation.

This, the basically biblical perspective was summed up powerfully by St. Anselm, from his Proslogium. “I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate your sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, --that unless I believed, I should not understand.” In other words, faith precedes understanding.

But, Enlightenment faith believed that man’s reasoning, philosophy, education had to be omnipotent, autonomous, or it was nothing. Moreover, one of the things that the Enlightenment rejected first of all, was the idea of a systematic truth, and this is why, for example, and I’ve read such lectures, when contemporary theologians are inducted into an endowed chair of systematic philosophy, in their introductory lecture, the first thing they attack is the concept of a systematic theology. Why? If systematic theology is possible, it means that God, having created all things, certain things follow. In other words, the world is a world of absolute law, absolute order, but if you believe man is God and the world just happened, you have to deny that there is any absolute law and any absolute order in the world. So you reject immediately the idea that there is an absolute law, and if you talk about God, as Karl Bart does, you insist that God has the freedom to be totally different tomorrow than he is today. In other words, one day God can affirm the Ten Commandments and the next day he can say the exact reverse, because you’re denying the concept of law, and God himself is totally subject to change, to brute factuality.

Now I’ve taken a little while to go into this because you cannot understand modern education apart from this concept of the autonomy of critical thought. Now John Dewey in his book Experience in Education, says that people must learn to set his own standards, his own ideals, in terms of himself, as criterion. When we read the Book of Judges, the theme verse of the Book of Judges repeated over and over again is this. “In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” When it speaks of “No king in Israel,” the king referred to is God who, a little later tells Samuel, “They have not rejected you but they have rejected me that I should not be king over them.” There was no king in Israel and every man “did that which was right in his own eyes,” but this is exactly what modern education is trying to produce and says is desirable; every man his own king. Every man his own god. Every man doing that which is right in his own eyes.

This is the goal for John Dewey. Is it any wonder then that we have the hippies, and the Existentialists, and the campus revolutionists? The miracle is that, after all these years of education into the autonomy of critical thought, we have many coming out of our schools who are not totally given to this anarchism. This is what their education is about. This is what it is designed to produce, so that in education, first of all, this modern concept, this modern fundamental faith{?} means. The pupil is a judge before he has any learning or wisdom. It is not appreciation. It is not understanding, but critical analysis which must be cultivated.

So that the child must be taught whatever is brought before him to view it critically, to tear it apart, to act as judge over it. This is instilled in the child from the very earliest days. Last night, a parent told me that one of their children in the public schools came home the first day from the first grade, and said, “I don’t have to mind you anymore. The teacher told me that.” Now, that was more open and bald in most cases, but it is commonplace for children to come home from school after they’ve been in the first grade for a little while, and begin to be rebellious and independent, and this simply means that the educational process is successful, because the whole point of modern education is to set up the child as the critic and judge, to do that which is right in his own eyes.

When I went to the University of California, in the English department, there was an old professor, Professor Kerns{?} who was regarded as the standing joke on the campus. Why? The old man was not a Christian, but he was simply a professor of the old school who believed that as he taught poetry, he should teach appreciation, a love of it. He loved to read. He read it beautifully, and it was a pleasure just to sit in his class for a minute and hear him read, but he was the joke on the campus. Why? Because it was his idea that you would appreciate it. What did everyone else in the English department teach? Critical analysis. Tear it to shreds. Demonstrate the superiority of your mind. I have talked to children in the public schools who were in the eighth grade, and they’re being taught to read Milton or Shakespeare and tear Milton and Shakespeare apart. They’re supposed to write a critical paper stating what the defects are in this or that passage or play. Now, it’s one thing for us to say, “Bring such a thing into examination in terms of the light of scripture.” In other words, there you are setting everything in terms of the sovereign authority of God. It’s another thing to say Put yourself over everything.

As a result, of course, our textbooks in literature, for example, have radically changed. Some of the greatest poems of the English language are unknown today. Why? Because these poems invite appreciation, and this must be {?} out. Let me cite an example of one of the great poems of the English language that is now no longer known. It is “The Burial of Sir John Moore,” written in 1817 by the Reverend Charles Wolfe. How many of you know this poem? Yes. One. {?} Mr. Filburn{?} knows it. Now, this poem is very literal history. Every detail of it is accurate. It is an incident from the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon invaded Spain, put up a puppet government, began the very savage persecution and murder of the Spaniards who fought against him. The Spaniards, at first, had been ready to welcome the French. They thought, “We don’t care for the old king. He’s not much of a ruler.” So they would have been very ready to receive Napoleon if it had not been such a savage and tyrannical regime that he set up. The English went in to try to overthrow Napoleon. In the course of it, a very fine Christian soldier, Sr. John Moore, was killed, in the course of the campaign when they had to retreat from one area. Now, here’s the poem:

Now that poem has disappeared. It’s not in the anthologies. It’s not in the textbooks. It’s one of the great poems of the English language. Why? Because, inescapably you see, it invites appreciation, and this is what you must remove from modern educator beliefs, or modern education. How can the child sit in judgment on that poem? He will be moved by it, and so you must have poetry now that can be torn apart, and you have, in the modern mood, the poetry of alienation from the world I never made. Now, this is a line from a modern poem. A World I never Made. That’s what wrong with the world. I didn’t make it. Therefore, I have to tear it apart and remake it. The autonomy of critical thought.

Just this last week I copied down a statement from a television broadcast by one of the new left student leaders as Columbia University, and it was this, when they were asked what they were doing. “First we’ll make our revolution. Then we’ll discover what for. Destroy first. Assert your supremacy by destroying what’s there. Then you can decide what you’re going to do. You’re the God. You’ll create a new heaven and a new earth.”

This then is the first purpose of modern education, the pupil to be made a judge, to tear apart what exists, to be as God over everything, and so the essential of modern writing is the abandonment of grammar and form. I’d like to read to you what, in one college textbook, is stated concerning proper writing, and this is from a modern writer.

“Submissive to everything, open, listening, write what you want, bottomless from bottom of the mind. The unspeakable visions of the individual. No time for poetry but exactly what is. Remove literary, grammatical, and syntactical inhibition. No fear or shame in the dignity of your experience, language, and knowledge. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under. Crazier the better. You’re a genius all the time.”

Now, this is the way to write, in other words. The more it comes from the bottom of your being, representing the cesspool of your experience, without inhibition, the crazier the better. Why? Because you must overthrow law and order, any kind of system, truth, God, because this is a world I never made. Therefore, destroy it, remake your own world.

Now, the second thing that is grilled into the child is that experience, private experience, is central, and this experience means lawless experience from the bottom of the mind. It has to be independent of God and law, and so perversion becomes an artistic way of life. I read awhile back the statement of a group of writers and artists who were systematically exploring every kind of perversion they could imagine, and they felt they were doing a great and a noble pioneering work for all men. This was the liberation of man from a man he never made, so they would be remembered, he declared, as pioneers by future generations, pioneers in the liberation of man, and so today you have the lionization{?} of men like Alan Ginsburg, a pervert who is hailed as a prophet, and Wright{?} gave him a cover picture and an extensive article as the prophet of the younger generation and treated him with respect. Or Jean Jenay{?}, the French pervert who, when he was in prison decided, ten, fifteen years ago, that there is no God, there is no crime because there is no law, and therefore, instead of being a criminal, I am the prophet of the future, because I am totally lawless, and so he began to write in terms of that, and immediately all the professors and intellectuals in France demanded his release. How could a great philosopher like that be kept in prison? I will not hesitate to call him as totally depraved as a man can be, nor will I even attempt to describe the nature of his writings, but this is the essence of it, and this lawlessness is emphasized by scientists when they talk about science philosophically. They sneak law into the laboratory, but when they’re outside of the laboratory they deny the concept of law.

Einstein, for example, sought to eliminate the concept of absolute time as meaningless, by redefining meaning in terms of refined experience in scientific experimentation, and he held that a concept has no meaning unless it is possible to demonstrate its meaning, experimentally.

John Dewey said the same thing. All of this is designed to eliminate the concept of God and law from education. Thus, experience is emphasized, and this experience must be lawless experience.

Then third, this concept of autonomy means the death of educational, personal, and social progress. After all, if there is no law, no God, there is no standard. Progress means going from here to something better, and if there is no better or worse, there is no educational progress possible. If everything is equal because there is no God, no good or evil, no absolute law, no concept of progress is possible, and so the only aim comes to be the destruction of Christianity, the destruction of godly law and order, and if it seems to you at times that our modern political situation seems insane, remember, it is planned chaos. Its function is to destroy the concept of good and evil. The worst hoodlum is as good as you are. There must be a leveling. In fact, he is better than you are because you discriminate, and there must be no discrimination, no differentiation. All things must be equal. No good or evil, no right and wrong.

Then, this means fourth, education into critical thought becomes the salvation of man. The way to save man is to free him from God, to make him his own god, and of course, I’ve developed the implications of this in my study, The Messianic Character of American Education. This is why Christian education must beware, lest it fall into the same pitfalls. The sad fact is I have walked into some Christian schools and I’ve seen the same kind of papers assigned to children, critical analysis of somebody’s thinking. Tear it apart in other words, and I’ve seen the papers the teachers thought were good papers, but the pupil in a Christian school must be taught to analyze, not in terms of his autonomy and superiority to Shakespeare and Milton, but in terms of the authority of God and a standard which he is under, and which Milton is under, and which Shakespeare is under, and he comes to these things to understand, to appreciate, to analyze in terms of one absolute law that governs him and everything else.

Presuppositions of Christian education then, are first of all, the sovereignty of God and the authority of his infallible word. Second, critical thought can function better in the context of Christian faith the autonomous humanism, because with us, reason, function as reason has a standard. It’s not lawlessness. It has {?}, and how can we measure without {?}? And when, in terms of modern education, the child and its experience, its mind as the only yardstick, you have a rubber yardstick for everybody. This is the destruction of education, the destruction of culture and civilization, but under Christian education, since you have a yardstick, the child’s mind can flourish. Its reason can be sharpened and whetted, and its critical faculties develop in terms of a solid faith and an absolute standard.

Christian thought must of necessity, if it is faithful to God and his word, be critical of man, and of the state, and of the world around us, because it is a fallen world, and it is a sin-filled world. So we approach the church, the school, everything, critically. Why? To bring it into conformity to the word of God, but what about modernism? What does it produce? How dare you criticize the church. How dare you insist there is an absolute law, a word of God in terms of which the church must be judged. You’re disloyal so get out. You’re mentally unstable. You can’t stick around this institution any longer. You get the same line if you’re critical of the government. You are presented mentally sick {?}, or if you criticize the schools. You’re lacking in mental health, you see, because there is no standard except the autonomous {?}. And so this leads, on the one hand to anarchism, and on the other hand to totalitarianism. Man is a law unto himself and cannot be criticized, and the state is a law unto itself and cannot be criticized, because there is no higher law over man and the state, so that truly critical thought can only be developed, not when man is autonomous, but when man is wholly subservient to God and his word.

Now a Christian education, third, is frankly authoritarian, but we must assert that all education is authoritarian. The basic question is not, “Are you authoritarian or not,” but whose authority prevails, God’s authority or man’s authority? For Christian education must assert at all times the absolute law of God, not man’s absolute freedom. Every area of life is under God’s law. Conflict is not solved by discussion. There is a term you hear increasingly now: dialogue. Now, dialogue is a term with philosophical meaning, and the jist of it is, Let’s get together and discuss out points of view. You give in a little and I’ll give in a little, and little by little we’ll come to a meeting ground which is no place, no man’s land. We cannot indulge in dialogue. We bring every thought, every area of education, every area of philosophy, of life, to captivity to Christ.

And finally, the purposes of Christian education are not academic. They are religious and practical. Man’s purpose is to exercise dominion under God, to bring all things into captivity to Christ, to fulfill the covenant with his God and the creation mandate, to exercise dominion over the earth with knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. The Christian school then, alone, can truly develop the rational and intellectual faculties of man, truly further science, truly further civilization, because where you have the autonomy of critical thought, it leads only to anarchy on the one hand and totalitarianism on the other. If is destructive.

Are there any questions now?

[Audience] I was curious. Do you see, with the autonomy of critical thought, do you see the state of anarchy taking place before totalitarianism?

[Rushdoony] They take place together. You are already already witnessing a steady growth into both total anarchy and totalitarianism. They go side by side, and at one and the same time, the students in Paris raised the black flag of anarchy and the red flag of totalitarianism.

[Audience] What would you regard as some of the Christian critical canons for literature?

[Rushdoony] Critical canons for literature. Now, first of all, we do have respect for absolute authority. Therefore, we believe it should be something that furthers a basically Christian experience. Second, the poetry, or novel, or essay should represent the best kind of form, literary form and style. There should be a respect for the language. Third, it should speak to the experience of the reader in terms of something that is a moment and yet is of permanence. In other words, to the basic aspects of man’s experience so that it will enable you to reassess your own experience in terms of the profounder experience of a greater mind.

For example, to give you a homely illustration. Do you remember in Mark Twain, I forget whether it was in Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, I think it was Tom Sawyer, where Tom is wrongly punished for something that Sid had done? And so he’s very unhappy and he goes to bed feeling very sorry for himself, full self-pity, and so he begins to imagine how to put his Aunt Polly into a position where she will be sorry. So he puts himself and his daydreaming through all kinds of experiences, the point is, “They’ll be sorry. They’ll be sorry they were mean to me,” and so he imagines himself, among other things, as drowning, and they pull him out of the river, and they lay his head on the pillow, and the locks fall on the pillow, and they sob over him, and he’s enjoying the experience. This Aunt Polly saying, “Oh why was I ever so mean to him? Why did I punish him?” He is going through all of this with tremendous relish. Of course, as it turns out, Aunt Polly finds out that it wasn’t Tom that had done it, but Sid, and what does she say? “Well, it wasn’t a lick amiss.” In other words, he probably had a number of lickings coming that he didn’t get, so it wasn’t a lick amiss.

Now, I don’t know whether you recall reading that and experiencing it, and feeling very much as Tom did, knowing there were times when you’d felt sorry for yourself, and you laugh at yourself as you laugh at Tom, and then when Aunt Polly said, “It wasn’t a lick amiss,” why, you realize, “Yes, I’ve gotten away with a lot of things I didn’t get spanked for, maybe I got clobbered a time or two for something I didn’t do, but it wasn’t a lick amiss.” Now this is why Tom Sawyer was such healthy reading for boys, because it enabled them to see themselves in the person of Tom, to see the absurdity of a lot of their daydreams, and to see them in terms of a healthy standard. Now, this is what good literature does. It enables you to see yourself in terms of a standard, and to analyze your own feelings, but today, when children are filled with self-pity, what do they do? Everything on television encourages them to feel that self-pity is something that needs rewarding, that they have been maligned and mistreated, and so the consequence of all our television and a good deal of our popular reading today is to encourage and foster self-pity, which is the worst mental cancer you can have. It is totally destructive of man. So, when you have good literature, it enables a man to see himself, or a child to see himself, to experience their own experience in terms of a standard, and this is invaluable. This is why literature is so necessary for us, good literature, and the children of this generation have been robbed. They have been robbed.

[Audience] In a book like you have mentioned, Tom Sawyer, there may be very poor grammar. In some books there may be an occasional swear word, or some small objectionable reference. What would you do about that in terms of using a book like that in the Christian school? Some people, some parents might object, but yet it’s a great piece of literature itself, but it has these, from some people’s point of view, minor blemishes. What would you do about that?

[Rushdoony] Yes. There are those blemishes in every work and yet, they are not entirely blemishes because the only way Mark Twain could reproduce what he was attempting to reproduce was to show the totality of it. In the dialogue there are these blemishes, but you are made conscious of the fact that they are. For example, Huck Finn is shown exactly for what he is. He is made an appealing figure to Tom Sawyer and to the other boys. He’s their ideal. He’s outside the law. But what is Huck Fin in the end? He is nothing. So that you are shown all of Huck Finn, with his blemishes, his particularly bad grammar and lawless speech, with all the glamour and romance that he represented to the boys who had to go to Sunday School, and who had to dress well and mind their “P’s & Q’s” and so on, but you are also shown Huck Finn as a rather pathetic character. So you get a total perspective on him. This is the value.

[Audience] Wouldn’t you say then, to dwell upon these small blemishes would be to miss the whole point. The teacher should be able to present the whole work in its overall {?}

[Rushdoony] Exactly. Yes. After all, one of the books the feminist movement objected to most of all 100 years ago was the Bible, because the feminists said there was a lot of bad language in the Bible and it should not be in the schools, and they actually rewrote the Bible. First, they made God into a “she,” and second, they went through and amended a lot of it, and this is, of course, wicked to the “nth” degree. Now, this isn’t wicked to do this about works of art, but it is wrong all the same. You’ve got to take the work in its totality, and the trouble, of course, with our modern literature, for example, Catcher in the Rye, is not that it has some bad words in it, which it does, but that it takes a boy through an experience it’s been compared to Tom Sawyer, but the viciousness of the book is that it takes a boy through a number of ugly experiences without any objective standard, without a norm. So that if you cleaned up the book completely, the book would be extremely vicious, precisely because there’s no objective standard to which the daydreams of the boy are subjected, and in Tom Sawyer, there is always a laughing at the folly of the boys, and that’s precisely the value of the book.

[Audience] So if a proficient teacher fails to bring out that, then she has {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Right. Because this is imperative at all times to present exactly what the worldview here is, and while Mark Twain himself was not a believer, Mark Twain grew up in a world of orthodox Christianity, his wife was an earnest believer, and he went to church every Sunday faithfully with her without exception, and he judged the world in terms of that perspective, although he did not have the personal faith. It’s clearly there in his works. This is the value of the great classics. They give experience in terms of a basic framework, to enable you to have a perspective on your experience, and this is the thing that the teacher must, at all times, have in mind.

[Audience] But you wouldn’t omit euphemisms {?}

[Rushdoony] Definitely not, definitely not.

[Audience] I, several times you mentioned infallibility {?} word of God. I was wondering if you might {?}

[Rushdoony] I mean that the Bible is the infallible word of God, without error, given to men by inspiration of God, and therefore, authoritative over every area of life. I believe, for example, when the Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth in the space of six days, that he meant six days, that we have to take the scripture as binding. Moreover, it means that it presents us the basic perspective for every area of life, so that, not only for my religious principles must I go to the Bible, but in terms of economics, in terms of political theory, in terms of science, I must be governed by premises which are biblical. The world is not a world of chance. It is the world totally created by God. God has, in the scripture, given us the guidelines for every sphere of life. Does that suffice?

[Audience] With the emphasis on Christ, {?} literature {?} watered down {?} I feel that this {?} material {?} feel that if they can’t figure it out for themselves {?}

[Rushdoony] I would partially agree with you. I believe we are perhaps overemphasizing science in grade schools, in that we are giving too much class hour to science and math, and too little of the basic fundamentals in these areas. In other words, they’re getting a very poor grounding in science and in math in the schools today. They could throw out over half of what they’re giving, and still give the pupils far more. The pupils need more than they’re getting, but they’re not getting it fro the way it’s taught, but actually in our education today, it’s not science that’s the most destructive. Your most subversive areas, from the grade school on up through the university are in English, because they’re dealing most directly with ideas, and history, and then in other related subjects, but if you go to most university campuses, for example, you will find there are more conservative students in the sciences than are in the liberal arts, so called. So that it doesn’t mean that the scientists are Christians, but it means that they haven’t gone as far down the road in this subversion. The average faculty will have its largest number of communists and subversives in English department, political science, economics, history, philosophy, and religion. In fact, I knew one college president who retired about two years ago who had an institution in California which was partly scientific, partly agricultural, a fine school, and he made it a policy never to allow a man in these so-called liberal arts, more than three years. He fired them regularly, because they were the menace. He cleaned house on them. He had the most conservative campus in the West. So, the sciences are not the real offenders here, and the sciences are not properly taught in our schools. There’s too much time given to them and too little accomplished.

[Audience] {?} sciences {?} there’s too much emphasis on what man has discovered. You remember Darwin’s law, Boyle’s {?} law, {?} law, and it’s almost as if those people had invented what they had really discovered, because God put it there and these men discovered it. I don’t even like, this is a personal thing, but I don’t even like it when a child brings in a butterfly in kindergarten, and this is called science instead, of studying God’s world, and I just think they were called “nature study” for a few years, and then science if there was, get away from the emphasis of man and what he has done with God’s world. I think a child should be taught that God has given us these things to use and if this is drilled into the child in the first few years, then he can go into science with an appreciation for what God has given him.

[Rushdoony] I agree with you and let me add this. I think we’ve overemphasized in our grade and high school science teaching, doing things, lab work (it becomes formally lab work later on), to the point where in a great many schools, and I’ve found this from talking to the pupils, they’re endlessly doing something which is called lab work, and they really haven’t learned anything. This is an unbalanced emphasis. I think lab work and a great deal of it has a great deal of room later on, when they are preparing themselves for work in the sciences, or for teaching sciences, but a lot of the so-called lab work, and field work, with kids is so much busy work, so much wasted time. What would you say as to that, Mr. {?}?

[Audience] I was going to say that I have taught physics in public high school, and we had a lab, and we did so much lab, you know, we felt we were doing a good job, and then when the kid would go, when he would go to college, he’d of done all of that lab {?} done the same thing with it, and it’s taken him three or four months, {?} lab. Got to teach them the theory, you know, and then we’ve found that students that got out of {?} were helping to sophomores in college {?}, but so they {?} and then the lab, we got the lab and they let {?} I agree with you that {?}

[Rushdoony] I’m glad to have you say that, because I’ve said this a number of times, at a number of places, and I’ve never found anyone who’s done what you did, and I’ve been jumped by a lot of chemistry and physics teachers who’ve never tried what you tried. They believe in this endless busywork, and you don’t learn anything from it, really.

[Audience] Well, that’s {?} sort of people who want to be technicians. You can have a technical school and {?} got to learn through the {?} agree with you on that.

[Rushdoony] And this is why I feel a great many Christian schools are making a mistake in that they feel they cannot do any real work in the sciences until they have a lot of expensive labs, whereas they could do far more work in basic teaching if they forget about the expense of these science buildings, and labs, that I’ve found some feel is imperative.

[Audience] Well, I think they cater to the parents, you have a parental pressure {?} The fact that society is saying, “Well, there’s no lab here.” {?} comparable to the public school {?} make sure that you don’t give in.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] That’s just publicity {?} I was, just as an example. I was at a barber shop, and {?} and we got to talking about school and he was surprised {?} high school and its different troubles in the private schools, they don’t have laboratory, and I said, “We have one,” {?} and he shut up, and he didn’t ask me {?}. Well, a few years ago {?} that there was an admiral there who taught physics, sciences, and I discussed this matter with him about experiments, and he said something that I thought was very interesting. He said, “Actually, these are not experiments. They’re merely demonstrations,” and I thought that was significant that a lot of this, they talk about experiments, the child’s going to make something entirely new, and all it is, is a demonstration, what’s discovered a long time ago, that you can learn about in a whole lot less time by reading a book, or giving a teacher lecture{?} than you can by going through hours of so-called experiment.

End of tape