Sam Butler » children

The Second Dynamic

Sam — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:47:13 +0000

As a Scientologist, I’m still quite impressed with the practicality of my own religion. Take relationships for example; there is a wealth of information in Scientology texts on this subject which, as many of us know anyway, is inseparable from the subject of communication. Scientology describes urges toward survival, called Dynamics, including the first four which are (1) self; (2) sex and the family; (3) groups; and (4) mankind. As I’ve just attended a wedding, congratulated a friend on his recent engagement, and been on a holiday of sorts with my girlfriend, I thought I’d share some wisdom on the Second Dynamic…

In 1981 a book was published by Scientologist writer Cass Pool which sought to bring together Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s written and transcribed material on the subject of the Second Dynamic, including sex, marriage, birth, raising children and more. Here’s a snippet from the first part of that book:

On the Second Dynamic we have a great many more adventures of considerable moment.

If you don’t think a Second Dynamic is adventurous, you should process some fellow on his wedding. The bride is supposed to be nervous, but you will find out this man has been in a state of shock all the years since the wedding. It will turn on terror charges and everything else. It doesn’t matter if he just went up before the Justice of Peace and the Justice simply put his stamp on the form and said, “OK kids, you’re married. Ten bucks, please.” It doesn’t matter how informal this thing was, we have still got a shock case.

That adventure into the very solid Second Dynamic is pretty darn aberrative because he is not accustomed to adventures on the Second Dynamic. When he is walking up and down the hospital hall waiting for the word as to whether he’s a father of twins, triplets or an idiot, he is undergoing a lot of stress.

Son comes home and sets his bag down kind of sheepishly just inside the living room door so he can pick it up and run. Dad is sitting there at the supper table and says, “How are you son? Gee, I didn’t know it was Easter vacation already.” And the son says, “It’s not. I was expelled.” It is an adventure. There is action, action, action on the First and Second Dynamics.

We are talking about more than just a bunch of sensation when we are talking about the Second Dynamic. We are talking about the sexual act, the begetting of children, the holding together and raising of a family and the management of the group these things represent.

We are talking about a lot more than what Freud meant when he said that nasty word that shocked the whole of late Victorian Europe, the “Libido Theory.”—L. Ron Hubbard, April 1966

I think that’s a refreshing look at the subject.

(And on a completely random note, HTML purists will notice my use of tags to provide definitions. I’m sorry. Better than having misunderstood words, I promise.)

Sex and Children: A Recipe for Disaster

Sam — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:14:08 +0000

Members of Parliament in England and Wales are calling for a reform to primary school sex education, which could see children as young as five being taught the mechanics of human reproduction alongside the emotional impact of recreational sex, pregnancy and parenthood. With teenage pregnancies in the UK at the number one spot in Europe, the Government understandably want to do something to arrest what seems to be an epidemic. But is this the right way to do it?

Sex education. ‘What’s that?’ I wondered. Necks tilted, we watched the small television screen mounted to the wall in our classroom, the teacher’s eyes as fixed as ours on the moving images. We were learning the ‘proper words’, you know, like ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’. How unexciting. More amusing was the trenchcoat-clad cartoon American detective who would go on to tell us about the thousands of bacteria that we would be harbouring if we didn’t wash our hands after going to the toilet. Hygiene was perhaps the most important thing they taught. We were 10 or 11 years old.

A nurse came to the school with some choice props, and all the boys were ushered into another classroom with our male teacher. While the young ladies were being prepared to deal with menstruation, us lads were given a heart-to-heart by our very real and caring teacher, a happily-married father of two. No doubt then, he was speaking from experience.

Recalling that neck-straining educational video once more, I think we all found the ‘wet dream’ scene strangely amusing. I don’t think any of us appreciated it fully, and at such an age we were at varying stages of physical development. The girls had started wearing bras in a minority of cases, but no-one was growing beards in Year 6, and we weren’t really at the stage where we would have to put this education into practice. Even then it was pretty early.

And what of teenage pregnancy? Well in subsequent years the girls had opted for older boyfriends who had already had the secondary school PSE (Personal and Social Education; now Personal Social and Health Education, PSHE) lesson with the ‘Durex Demonstrator’ and the free condoms. By the age of fourteen I knew several girls who were sexually active, two years before it was legal. They weren’t getting pregnant, they were applying what they’d learnt from that first lesson at age 10 or 11: contraception is easily available and sex is okay as long as it’s safe. While these statements certainly ring true, is this the kind of candid truth we want our youngest to discover? Perhaps in all honesty we do, but it is certainly not the whole truth.

Morals are a subject often referenced as being in general decline. As science is increasingly used to ‘disprove’ religious beliefs, humanists and evangelists are locked in a head-on struggle, each going to further extremes to make themselves right by making the other party as wrong as possible. Neither of them would say that morals are a bad idea, but both would criticise each other’s idea of the subject. Yet morals are neither exclusively religious nor secular in nature. They are simply agreements based on common sense.

The sexual abuse of children, rape, promiscuity—these are considered by many to be immoral. They go against the widely-held views of society that children are children, adults are responsible for themselves, and one should be faithful to his or her sexual partner, with some differences in areas where polygamy is part of the culture. But the old law of the omitted data comes into play very quickly in this arena:

WHERE THERE IS NO DATA AVAILABLE PEOPLE WILL INVENT IT.

This is the Law of the Omitted Data.

A vacuum tends to fill itself. Old philosophers said that “nature abhors a vacuum.” Actually the surrounding area of pressure flows into an area of no pressure.
—L. Ron Hubbard, 1972

If we choose to let our children be taught about sex, it has to be within the social context. In addition, it has to be at a time and in a manner that can be identified with by the children. Your average five-year old boy hates girls and thinks they’re from another planet, or is scared to death of them. He’s not interested in what he can do with his manhood, unless he needs the loo. At that age, that’s all it’s useful for. The unfortunate reality is that the entire social fabric could be corrupted by premature sex education, compounded by the inadequacy of moral standards.

My opinion, which I am sure is shared by parents across the country, is that this is a case of upbringing and not necessarily one of primary education; parents should be able to educate their children on the facts of life when their children are ready for it, when they enquire, or when mummy and daddy decide it’s time for a talk about ‘the birds and the bees’. And seldom will this be at five years old.

Real problems that grip the youth of today’s society are broken families and alcohol and drug abuse. Ill sexual health and teenage pregnancy tend to fall somewhere alongside or between these issues, and are more of a symptom than the cause. Areas that are lacking in British schools, per my recent experience, are effective drug education and instilling a general sense of responsibility in students. These are not simple tasks, but their ramifications if skilfully implemented are wide-ranging.

By the will of ill-informed psychologists, teachers are being advised to leave more and more to the whim of students, even if their instinct tells them this would be irresponsible. Harm minimisation is a drug education concept, but is mirrored in sex education and in general in today’s school system. It doesn’t work to improve anything, but is a way of passively giving in to the idea that ‘change is impossible’. Consider this: children who underperform in some secondary school subjects are entered into lower ‘tiers’ of examination, for which they are taught to aim for a limited level. Even if a student decides he or she is going to get all the answers on the exam paper correct, and even if he manages to, he will never attain the top grade if his teachers have entered him into the ‘intermediate’ or ‘foundation’ tier. Most tiered subjects have a ‘higher’ paper in which it is possible to attain an A*-D grade, and a ‘foundation’ paper in which the highest grade is C. Some have a third (‘intermediate’) in the middle of the two, which can deliver grades B-E. This is ‘harm minimisation’ at work in academic subjects.

The question remains, is it moral to teach the very young about a subject they cannot and should not use until they are older? Try teaching a five-year old neurology and let me know how it goes. Until then, I’ll reserve judgement, and say no.

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If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

Sam — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:51:24 +0000

The over-worn phrase came into play today as I read an article on Reuters UK about English spelling. The general consensus inside the insular world of one Professor Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University (where?), is that we should just accept commonly misspelt words and get over it. It almost sounds reasonable until you look closely at the insinuation. Smith is saying that the fact that people spell things incorrectly is ‘unchangeable’ and that rather than helping students—and people in general—to properly conform to the agreed-upon spellings of words so as to effect intelligible written communication, we should modify the agreements and accept it as a consequence of life, the universe and everything. I disagree…

“Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea,” Ken Smith, a criminology lecturer at Bucks New University, wrote in the Times Higher Education Supplement.

“University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.”

To kickstart his proposal, Smith suggested 10 common misspellings that should immediately be accepted into the pantheon of variants, including “ignor”, “occured”, “thier”, “truely”, “speach” and “twelth” (it should be “twelfth”).

Codswallop. Responses were invited on the Reuters blog, and I was beckoned…

@Steve, 1:05pm, who supports Professor Smith: You spelt “grammar” wrong. Of all the possible words…

Alright look-a-here: to subscribe to the notion that spelling mistakes are ‘a consequence of life’ or ’something we have to accept’ is to equally submit to the idea that ‘man can’t change’ and ‘intelligence can never rise.’ These are the ideas propounded by modern psychology and it does not surprise me that this call for *more* dumbing down of education comes from a “criminology” lecturer. Criminology, the study of crime as an individual and social phenomenon, is deeply rooted in psychology. Modern psychology however, has led to ‘pleas of insanity’ and ‘mental incapacity’ in place of “Yes, your honour, I killed the man – I plead guilty.”

Before I rant too much, know that there is a way to overcome this and it’s called teaching. Teaching does not mean however, that you throw words and numbers at children or get them to chant things and hope they remember enough to regurgitate it onto an exam paper for which they have prepared the night before. Teaching is the process of effecting LEARNING, which is something you can’t do if your mistakes, including spelling mistakes, are not corrected. And the correction should be done with care and patience, or you’ll rub your students up the wrong way and they’ll *refuse* to learn.

Recap: This is a bunch of crap; it is possible to change things; teaching requires learning be effected.

(By the way, this sparked a bit of a discussion about usage of the word spelt. For your information, this is a chiefly British past participle of the verb spell.)

Now, I want to expand on that. That’s why I have my own website you see, because I can’t say everything I want to in those little comment boxes. The question raised in the title of the blog entry was “Does spelling matter?” I say yes; emphatically so.

Communication is a key part of life. You don’t have to be a Scientologist to know that, but I must admit that I’ve learned more about communication from reading L. Ron Hubbard’s books than anywhere else. Communication is ordinarily based on agreements such as language and grammar, as well as social agreements like the distinction most people make between talking to a close friend and talking to their employer. Spelling is one of these agreements, and it can exist within the context of a language or even a dialect.

Spelling reform has occurred throughout Europe at various times in history, and I’ll leave that one to the linguists contributing to Wikipedia, or your local language professor. I don’t claim to be an expert on such matters, but I do know of recent changes to the German language from studying it at school and college. They changed the agreed-upon spellings of certain words, thereby changing what was considered ‘real’ German by its speakers. This reform therefore changed the agreed-upon reality. So you see that reality is essentially composed of agreements of some kind.

In Britain, English spellings have been standardised for many years. According to the Wikipedia article on British English, “modern British spelling was [largely] standardised in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).” This may have been arbitrary but it became the agreed-upon reality. Lexicographers compiling the ever-growing Oxford English dictionaries do not control usage and spelling per se, but they of course have a hand in propagating what they record by including it in such an authoritative text as the OED or its derivatives.

Grammar is another one but this is largely misunderstood, misinterpreted or ill-defined. L. Ron Hubbard wrote about this, so I thought I’d give you what he said. It makes perfect sense to me…

Grammar is the way words are organized into speech and writings so as to convey exact thoughts, ideas and meanings amongst people. It is essentially a system of agreements as to the relationship of words to bring about meaningful communication.

That is all that grammar is. If it is defined otherwise, students will think they are being taught classroom rules rather than how to talk and read.

From Grammar by L. Ron Hubbard.

Like spelling, grammar has evolved out of common usage; agreed-upon or logical ways of writing and speaking that have been adopted by others. The English language has grown out of Germanic and has influences from many different languages, particularly Latin and French. It is a very well-developed language with its own simplicity and odball complexities. An effort to create a universal language was made by Russian-Polish opthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof. The result was Esperanto, a constructed language which did not take off to perhaps the intended degree. But this was based on one man’s arbitraries rather than cultural development and accepted usage.

Sometimes, a break from the norm of agreed-upon reality can be used in a literary context to create an effect. I regard the most famous example of this to be Lewis Carroll’s poem, The Jabberwocky (1872). Carroll uses made-up words and portmanteaux to weave a world of mystery and nonsense, and he does very well at it. This, Edward Lear’s The Jumblies, and John Agard’s Half-Caste are among my all-time favourite poems.

But when I talk to people, or otherwise communicate, I don’t see that using unfathomable words or unintelligible spellings is going to achieve the intention of my communication. It might create an effect, but what effect am I trying to create? So in written communication, spelling helps us to achieve an agreement as to what we are trying to say. Sometimes words have different meanings but often the context is enough to point out which definition is being applied. Then again, it is always possible to misunderstand words, so knowing how to use a dictionary helps tremendously.

Now, I have always been good with English. I was able to read before going to school and I did very well in spelling tests and English classes. I came out with the top grade in GCSE English Language, and I’m proud of that. I know people who have not had such a good time, and in some cases it’s because they have trouble with their spelling. Here’s where you meet the challenge of correcting a person’s spelling in such a way that they don’t feel that they are being attacked or made to feel wrong. Yes, in some ways they may be wrong because they’ve departed from the agreed-upon reality of what constitutes standard spelling. But at the same time, the task must be done tactfully.

This is something that really needs to be done—and done well—at primary schools and by parents at home. Noticing an incorrectly-spelled word and letting it slip could make a world of difference to that person. If no-one says otherwise, he or she will think they are right, and will continue to make the same mistake because they don’t perceive it as a mistake. That’s what learning is for! So the person makes a mistake—alright, pick them up, tell them where they went wrong, and encourage them to carry on. The way not to do it would be by blasting the person, especially a child, and telling them how horribly wrong they are and how the world is going to fall apart because of their little spelling error. I do not advocate this tyrannical approach to teaching or to generally dealing with people.

In the end, your knowledge carries a responsibility. If you see something and you know it isn’t right, then correct it! Too often in society I see things go by ‘unnoticed.’ They aren’t unnoticed; they’re ignored. I too have done this and I always feel bad for it afterwards. It’s almost a corollary to the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well, if it is broke, do fix it! And in doing so you’ll have helped somebody, as long as you don’t ‘fix it’ by making them wrong in the process.

So, in short, spelling matters, communication is important, and teaching is useful only where somebody learns something. I could write more on the different aspects I’ve touched on here, and perhaps I will. Until then, adiós.

Sam Butler » children

The Second Dynamic

Sex and Children: A Recipe for Disaster

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