" 
 :::You're talking as if there haven't been studies of what does and does not work in the classroom. There have been. Lots of them, even. There's the TIMSS study, the Dental Education study, the University of Knottingham's Effective Classroom Practice study... There are studies on the Waldorf methods, studies on law classrooms, studies to the left of me, studies to the right... I don't claim they're all flawless, and I don't claim they're all correct. But there are plenty of rigorous studies of classroom methods conducted by and for educators. It may be ""soft"" science, but it's there. Education has improved by leaps and bounds over the last 100 years because instructors got interested in studying how we study. So they do, absolutely, have more scientific basis than Scientology. It's not just that they're widespread. 
 :::I'm not surprised that you can find examples of study tech working. I can find examples of whole language working. Doesn't mean I'm for replacing phonetics. I am surprised that you can't find examples of it not working, since from my reading that's one of the complaints of people who have left Scientology. 
 :::Now to your responses to my specific points: 
 :::#) All over the Applied Scholastics website, they refer to their techniques as ""proven."" I suppose they don't use the word ""scientifically"" explicitly, but based on context it is definitely implied. There's also the fact that the word ""technology"" itself is indicative of a scientific undertaking. Repurposing the word for religious reasons is fine, but ""study tech"" is presented to schools as a secular concept, which brings us to... 
 :::#) Study tech is religion. It is used specifically in religious practices, and was developed for those practices. It's only in relatively recent years that it's made a secular appearance, and it still uses Scientology jargon (like ""MASS"" and ""Gradient""). And I'm sorry, but if the ""underlying belief that the student is not a deterministic automaton but a spiritual being"" is part of study tech, that is absolutely, positively religious, and has no place in secular classrooms. I don't want my daughter's teachers imposing their ideas of what a ""spiritual being"" is on her. 
 :::So does that invalidate study tech in my eyes? Not necessarily, but it would need to be studied before secular use, outside of Scientology, by the same education boards and educators that set curriculum standards for other methods of teaching, and all religious  i.e., Scientology  aspects of it would need to be expunged. I would of course have no problem with it in a religious school as long as the students using it meet standards for literacy and other basic skills.  "