The Third Barrier — The Misunderstood Word

The third barrier to study is the most important of the three. This third barrier is misunderstood words. Misunderstood definitions or undefined words can thoroughly block one's understanding of a subject and can even cause one to abandon the subject entirely.

The Third — and Most Important — Barrier: The Misunderstood Word

(1) If a person encounters difficulty with what he is reading,

(2) there will be a misunderstood word earlier in the text. He must go back and locate the word.

(3) When he looks up the word in a dictionary and defines it,

(4) the difficulty vanishes and he can progress.

This milestone in the field of education has great application, but it was overlooked by every educator in history.

Going past words or symbols for which one does not have proper definitions gives one a distinctly blank or washed-out feeling. The person will get a “not there” feeling and will begin to feel a nervous hysteria. These are manifestations distinct from those experienced with the other two barriers.

A reader coming to the bottom of a page only to realise he does not remember what he has just read is experiencing the phenomenon of misunderstood words, and one or more misunderstood words will always be found just before the material became blank in his mind.

The barrier of misunderstood words is far more important than the other two. It establishes aptitude or lack of aptitude. A person may or may not have talent as a painter, but his ability to perform the activity of painting is dependent upon definitions. There is some word or words in the field of painting or art that the person who is inept did not define or understand and that was followed by an inability to paint. The same holds true for any endeavour. And it means that the restoration of the ability to carry out an activity in any given situation depends in no small part on understanding the terms associated with that situation.

So, too, in human relations, the interchange of ideas between people depends primarily upon words and symbols. These can be written or spoken. Sounds, pictures, emotions and past associations also play a part. While many treatises exist concerning the development and meaning of words, little attention has been devoted to the effect of words or the consequences of their misuse or non-comprehension.

What was not considered or appreciated before L. Ron Hubbard's development of Study Technology is that the flow of ideas in any message or field of learning can be blocked by misunderstood words or symbols, suppressing further understanding or comprehension from that point forward. Further, misunderstood words can act in such a way as to bring about ignorance, apathy and revolt in the classroom and depress productivity in the workplace.

This sweeping discovery is applicable to any sphere of endeavour, and opens wide the gates to education.

From these fundamentals flow a precise technology of application that permits anyone to unlock any subject they are trying to learn. This technology includes exact methods for resolving the purpose for undertaking a course of study, procedures to identify and correct each of the three barriers, methods to teach students to become self-correcting and self-paced learners, and new approaches to teaching grammar, with the purpose of bringing all students to 100% conceptual understanding of the materials they read.