An excerpt from the Head of School Address at Parents Weekend 2023 by Trevor Ott

Sometimes I think to myself that you all already know everything there is to know about this school. To some degree, that is true. That you have chosen us to assist in your child’s education is a big decision, and in having done that, you stand amongst our greatest supporters. 

I realize that even before enrollment, you know a lot about who we are and the importance of what we are doing here as it concerns your children, the field of education, and society as a whole. What we are doing here is different, and though the technology we employ was developed many decades ago by L. Ron Hubbard, it remains more advanced than anything else in use or development today. It is still new news, and it is newsworthy. 

Two weeks ago, at our weekly Wednesday night staff meeting, this concept hit me newly, differently. I’ve been attending staff meetings for 23 years, so what is covered in any given week is not always new news to me, but this meeting was different. I don’t know if the staff meeting itself was different or if it was a difference in me.

Either way, I was inspired, and I want to share with you two parts of that meeting as they were shared with the staff and the faculty.

STAFF MEETING PART ONE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE DEAN 

In the first part of the meeting, our Dean, Jordan Siegel, shared a selection of highlights she collected from staff and students regarding various activities happening daily around the school, including the following:

Choir Highlight

After a choir trip, Upper School choir director Adam Whitworth sent a photo with this story: “I thought I’d share this moment from yesterday. This photo is not staged. I had to snap it before they saw me. The choir rolled into this really great bookstore/coffee shop in Scappoose. We had 90 minutes to kill before the awards ceremony. I told the students that it was regular protocol for us to do a study hall. The owner told me he was initially worried about seeing a school bus, but after twenty kids ordered, spread out, and started studying, and it was really quiet (most students reading physical books too), he was like, ‘What is this voodoo??’”

Form 3 Reading Highlight

Form 3 student OceanLee Hamilton wrote the following about reading: “My favorite subject is R-E-A-D-I-N-G! I love reading because when I read, it feels like the story sucks me into it. When I am reading, I do not realize what’s happening around me!

“Like one time I tried to walk and read. I am never doing that again. I ran into three walls, six chairs, and two people! And that is why I love reading, but not reading and walking!”

Course Completion Highlight

Ansel Sessions wrote the following about what he learned when he completed The Thinking Book course: “I thoroughly enjoyed this course. I felt like I gained an enormous amount of data from this course. I learned words such as datum, law, and fact. I also learned all the outpoints and pluspoints. I feel this course left no holes in my knowledge, and it will almost certainly help me in the rest of my courses and throughout my life.”

Writing Highlight

Form 6 supervisor Cristofer Maximilian said the following about his student Elliot Adams: “Elliot came to me today to let me know that he had counted up the essays he’d written in his previous schooling: thirty-two. He told me that he’s now written over ninety since being at Delphian. He was very proud of this! 

“He also wrote an essay for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, strongly criticizing Tom Sawyer. His mom happened to see the essay and shared it with a friend who teaches at a school in Washington. The friend thought it was great and told her that he really wished his school would allow students to write essays like that (where they don’t have to regurgitate the book and are allowed to be critical of ‘classics,’ etc.).”  

Course Completion Highlight

After completing The Study Handbook, Katja de Vries had this to say: “The Study Handbook made many good points about education and how it affects students and children. Many of my viewpoints changed after reading this book. I used to think education was just what gets taught through books, but now I see that education is also things like projects and activities. 

“My conclusion about the approach of teaching and learning presented in this course is that strong, smart, and capable people are the main goal. Education is there to create individuals who are self-determined and competent. The idea of self-determinism stood out to me most of all. Self-determinism determines an individual’s success and is important to a society’s growth. The Study Handbook details the ideas and approaches that will create truly competent individuals.”

Career Interest Apprenticeship Highlight

Form 7 student William Collins did a career interest apprenticeship with local contractor Paul Janowski. Here is what Paul had to say about William’s performance: “Thank you for choosing Oregon Curb Appeal for your Delphian School internship. I am glad that our project workload coincided with your internship requirements.

“As for your work, you were easy to train and quickly grasped the many different tasks you were given without needing much in the way of handholding. I purposefully gave you a range of tasks. [He listed about thirty.]

“Your attitude was outstanding each day, and you were a pleasure to work with. Your parents must be very proud of you, and I would not be at all surprised to see you exceed your life goals.”

Career Interest Apprenticeship Highlight

Senior Saachi Mann did a career interest apprenticeship at the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival. Here is what her advisor had to say about her performance: “What a privilege it was to meet this delightful young woman. Saachi contacted me to see about shadowing at our farm during the tulip festival.

“She arrived early and was willing to do anything we asked of her.

“Saachi met a lot of people in our organization and was able to spend time with a couple of the other owners.

“Everyone I checked with was very impressed with her demeanor, her asking appropriate questions, and her willingness to jump in and do whatever was asked of her. She used her time wisely, and when a task was finished, she came looking for more to do. 

“Her training at your school reflects the solid foundation to be successful in this life. I hope that she excels in her given trade.”

STAFF MEETING PART TWO: A BRIEFING FROM THE DIRECTOR OF CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

In the next part of the staff meeting, we watched a video created by Alan Rothe, our Director of Curriculum Development. The video was created to brief various other schools using our curriculum and program. 

[start of video transcript]

Who are we, and why do we do what we do? 

Here’s a planet you are intimately familiar with. 

When we began curriculum development back in 1976, we did so for specific reasons. The planet, our planet, needed some attention. Why? Well, it had and still has certain characteristics we’re all too familiar with: war, insanity, criminality, drugs, illiteracy, and immorality. 

One might ask, why are so many people so confused? There could be many thoughts about this, and many would be valid. But I want to focus on one thing: false data and its impacts on the field of education. 

I can say, with some degree of certainty, the whole field of education lives in a fog. Sorry to be so blunt, but I’m afraid it is true. I could go on for hours discussing the crazy, false, and often terribly destructive ideas people, usually of the best intentions, are operating on out there in the field of education.

The wonderfully good news about this is that something can be done about it!

How? How does one go about attacking the smothering cloud of fog in the field of education? Exactly how it was begun in 1976 and has been carried on since by L. Ron Hubbard-based research and discovery—by carefully studying and applying Hubbard’s discoveries in the fields of study, education, children, and learning to K-12 education. 

The result back then was, and still is, curriculum and graduation requirements. There are many, many things we do and produce in curriculum development: books, learning guides, project guides, faculty manuals, lesson plans, exams, form exams, diagnostic tests, software, flashcards, workbooks, and the list goes on and on. But ultimately, it all ends up as curriculum and graduation requirements.

We research, we develop, we test, we publish, and if we do it well, it gets into your hands as materials you can use to produce graduates. And those graduates turn back around and attack the fog we set about trying to clear nearly fifty years ago. Whether they are full Form 8 Delphian graduates or Delphi Academy High School graduates, or graduates of whatever you offer as your highest level, you send them back into the fog, and they help bring some clarity to the parts of the world, large or small, that they have chosen to play in.

Because we have done the work to make these materials, they are increasingly coming out in a form that others can understand, appreciate, and use, so you get this side product—materials export. 

And now you have the simple picture of what we do here in curriculum development. We take the powerful truths provided by Mr. Hubbard, apply them to education in the form of truly workable educational materials (curriculum and graduation requirements), and give them to you. You make graduates, and graduates help us clear the fog, bolstered and assisted by the export of sane educational materials more broadly.

Eventually, the fog starts to clear because the false data is replaced by true data. And someday, if we just keep at it, we will achieve a big, big goal: a civilization based in reason.

[end of video transcript]

That video got me to see what we are doing here in a new way. To summarize, we live on a planet in a society in need of help, covered by fog, false data, and even destructive ideas which permeate our culture and the educational system. 

What exactly are we doing here on this hill? 

Heron Books is developing valuable, truthful, agenda-free educational materials to assist Delphi Schools in creating graduates.

Those graduates, armed with truly useful information and the ability to think and change conditions for the better, leave to enter the broader world and do their work to lift the fog.

To assist them in that work, Heron Books makes those same materials available to the broader world—creating little pockets of truth and sanity for those graduates to operate in with at least some existing agreement and understanding upon which to build their lives.

Simple yet complete. That’s exactly what we are doing.

How’s it going? Look a student in the eye. Imagine the future.

Still, we need to do more. We need to have more students. We need to be full. We need to graduate more students at a higher level of self-determinism each year. And we need to get more truth out in the world to assist them in lifting the fog.

I have one recent highlight along that line to share.

In the 1950s and 1960s, L. Ron Hubbard did extensive research in the field of education. He made his discoveries available to members of his church through writing and lecture. Those discoveries were of such importance to the future of humankind that in the 1970s, he granted permission for their use to Applied Scholastics International, a secular non-profit with the mission to make those discoveries available as broadly as possible. 

Heron Books and the Delphian School, also founded in the 1970s, were licensed by Applied Scholastics to use those discoveries and took on responsibility for helping to create secular materials primarily for use here in the Delphi program, but always with the hope of making them more broadly available too.

In 2019, in partnership with Applied Scholastics, we were authorized to make available worldwide the secularized discoveries of Mr. Hubbard that we had been using for many years.

And that brings me to the final highlight from that staff meeting.

Just a few weeks ago, President of Applied Scholastics, Christine Gerson (here in the room with us now) went to Samoa along with her team and 1500 copies of a book developed and piloted here.

That book is Teaching: A New Approach, which covers many of the most important philosophical aspects that make our educational program work. Along with those books went ten thousand dictionaries, including several hundred of the Heron Derivation Dictionary and a shipping container full of other materials.

A total of 747 educators were trained directly by this team, all either completing a course on Teaching: A New Approach or attending a seminar-style introduction to the three barriers to study. The vast majority received training in both.

While there, the Assistant Chief Executive Officer for the Samoan Teacher Training Division told the Applied Scholastics team that Teaching: A New Approach is the only training she wants the Ministry of Education to roll out this year, as it is the only material that is actually going to improve the teacher attitudes and the classroom environment, and thus make a difference in student achievement.

In addition to that, 240 educators signed up for further training at the Applied Scholastics main campus in St. Louis, Missouri, where they will complete the same course we use to train our own faculty using the far more comprehensive Education: Fostering Reason and Self-determinism in Students, also developed here and published by Heron Books.

As exciting as all that is, it is just the beginning. Samoa’s Minister of Education intends to get this training in every school and into the hands of every educator in the country. 

We are a part of that—a gentle breeze, building into a strong wind, helping clear the fog ahead of our graduates around the world. I thought you’d like to know.

Again, it has been a great year. Thank you for being part of the group. We wouldn’t exist without you, and we are honored by your support.

Thank you for letting me include you in our staff meeting.

I’d like to close by asking you to help me acknowledge the following: the broader team of Heron Books and Delphian, including you, for all the many ways the school receives support; Alan Rothe and Heather Kertchem, in particular, for the internal development of our curriculum, including the secular materials derived from Mr. Hubbard’s writings; Applied Scholastics International and Christine Gerson in particular, for licensing us for the use of those materials; and L. Ron Hubbard for making his research and discoveries in the field of education available to the world.