I received a brochure for the Delphi Lower School in La Jolla yesterday.

Apparently, it was sent to people in my parent's neighborhood at random, being delivered to a demographic of older people with no grade-school aged kids! Rather a waste for this slick brochure, but consistant with Scientology's inept and wasteful operations.

It looks quite slick, as I said, glossy paper, full color. I'd say that, if I knew nothing about Scientology, this school sounds very good for elementary grade kiddies. Emphasis on basics and encouraging creativity and curiousity sound good on paper. Especially slick, heavy, shiny paper.

On the first fold, it says, and I quote, "The first few years of education should give a child the <i>right start </i>- a solid grasp of the basics, a love of learning and a genuine curiosity about the world around."

The world around? Odd sort of phrase, repeated in a window inside the brochure, "A young child has a natural thirst for learning. The Lower School curriculum is designed to nurture that natural enthusiasm and, at the same time, instill in each child a growing confidence about tackling the world around."

Okay, this all sounds pretty good. You would want your child to get a love of learning and a good grip on the basics.

While discussing this in their paragraphs under 'Focus on Basics,' we are told that the school doesn't get caught up in teaching trends. They have held on to "time tested methods." Here's a peculiar sentence regarding their teaching, "No "whole language" or "whole math" - reading and math are not guessing games."

Whatever the hell these "whole" programs are, the implication is that 1. These programs exist 2. Other schools use them 3. Somehow they utilize guessing games to teach math and reading, whereas Delphi does not.

(note here, math was always a guessing game for me!) Elsewhere in the brochure is a blurb about something called 'Heron Program Development.' This section states, "The majority of the curriculum utilized by Delphi teachers in the Lower School is published by Heron Books(tm), established for the Delphi Schools Network with the purpose of researching and developing the school curriculum."

Another publishing arm of the CO$?

Hubbard is only mentioned once in the brochure, under the section titled, "Learning How to Learn." It says, "Our approach to teaching and study is based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard, American philosopher and educator."

The rest of the brochure is puffery, meant to promote this amazing school. Nowhere does it suggest that the products of this superior learning system continue on to college.

Now, considering the 'source' of this brochure, I was positive that there would be at least one serious error present. I was looking for misspellings or syntax mistakes, but when I finally found the error, it was even better than a simple spelling goof!

There's a bar graph provided, that shows how Delphi students surpass the norm, based on the California Achievement Test, reading section. The grey bars are the norm, you can see that the Delphi School children are way above them in performance. However, and bidet as it may, the graphic artist who laid this out is obviously inferior when it comes to arranging a simple bar graph. At the bottom of the graph, we see the label GRADE (BY AGE) The data listed above is K through 8.

Up the left side of the graph are numbers 2-14. This data is labelled GRADE EQUIVALENT.

I'm not sure how old K is. I can only conclude that the silly clambrains SCREWED UP THE GRAPH by mislabelling the data!

Here's the kicker, though. I *knew* I'd find at least one mistake in this brochure! It just cracks me up, all this promotion of the vaunted 'tech' and they wind up with nothing but another hole in their foot!

--
Barb
Chaplain, ARSCC
http://members.home.net/bwarr1/index.htm "Every week, every month, every year, every decade and now every century, Scientology does weird and stupid things to damage its own reputation."- Steve Zadarnowski

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