Consider this for a moment: In all your schooling, did anyone ever teach you how to study something? Today, people are graduating school unable to read or write at a level adequate to hold a job or deal with life. It is a huge problem. It is not that subjects cannot be learned; what isn’t taught is how to learn. It is the missing step in all education. Learn much more about how to study in the booklet The Technology of Study and the course on this subject.

Absence of Mass The first barrier to study is called “absence of mass.” In Study Technology, we refer to the mass and significance of a subject. By “mass” we mean the actual physical objects. The “significance ” of a subject is the meaning or ideas or theory of it. If you were studying about tractors, the mass would be the tractor. Imagine how little you would understand if you had never actually seen a tractor. An absence of mass can actually make a student feel squashed, bent, sort of dizzy, sort of dead, bored and exasperated.

Too Steep a Gradient The second barrier is “too steep a gradient.” A “gradient” is a gradual approach to something taken step by step, level by level. Each stop or level is itself, easily attainable—so that finally, complicated and difficult activities can be achieved with relative ease. The term also applies to each of the steps taken in such an approach. When one hits too steep a gradient in studying a subject, a sort of confusion or reelingness results. The remedy for too steep a gradient is to cut back the gradient. Just as learning how to ride a bicycle is often too steep a gradient for a child, a set of training wheels makes it possible for him to progress. This is a proper gradient.

The Misunderstood Word The third—and most important barrier—is the “misunderstood word”. It is a word which is not understood or wrongly understood. Going on past a word that was not understood gives one a distinctly blank feeling or washed-out feeling. The confusion or inability to grasp or learn comes after a word that the person did not have defined and understood. If a person didn’t have misunderstood words, his talent might or might not be present, but his doingness in that subject would be present.