The Delphian school is a co-ed K-12 boarding school, though only ages 8+ are eligible to live on campus full time, with children as young as 5 able to attend day classes. It’s located in Sheridan, Yamhill County, Oregon which is a small town of about 6,000 that’s an hour or so drive from Portland.

The Delphian School was founded in 1976 on the site of a former Jesuit Novitiate, or religious school. As of 2021 it serves 230 students, with a campus spanning 720 acres, on which sits a four story building that’s the heart of the facilities proper.

The full street address is 20950 SW Rock Creek Rd. Sheridan, OR 97378 although given church history I would strongly advise against making any unannounced visits. I actually first became aware of this Scientological training center in my own home state of Oregon during the media spotlight that was placed on Scientology in 2008 or thereabouts, lasting until around 2010.

_{Tony Webster, via Wikipedia Commons}

The average person’s connection to the Delphian School is likely to be more tenuous, but if you know Suri Cruise, daughter of famed actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, you know someone who was at one time going to attend The Delphian School.

Jaden Smith, of “if mirrors aren’t real, then how can our eyes be real?” internet fame is sometimes incorrectly cited as Delphian School alumni. Rather his dad, famed actor and seemingly ex-Scientologist Will Smith opened an unrelated children’s school with Jada Pinkett Smith named New Village Leadership Academy based, in part, on Study Tech.

The Delphian School teaches from the Delphi Curriculum, also based on Study Tech, an educational approach developed by L. Ron Hubbard. Originally intended for use within the church to teach new members from less privileged backgrounds to read, Study Tech was eventually expanded into a broader system for improving comprehension that could be generalized to topics other than literacy.

_{Wikipedia Maps, by OpenMaps}

Study Tech teaches us, among other things, that there exist three principal barriers to comprehension: Absence of Mass (when an abstract concept is not physically illustrated or demonstrated), Too Step a Gradient, which essentially means an unapproachable learning curve, and Missed Word, which is when a lesson continues despite the material or instructor having used a word the pupil doesn’t know the meaning of.

In which case, Word Clearing is employed, wherein the student looks up the definition of that word and words based on the same root, then being tasked with constructing their own sentences using those words. If you thought to yourself “most of that sounds like good common sense teaching strategies” you’d be right, but Study Tech also denies the existence of learning difficulties with a psychological or biological basis.

That’s an increasingly common attitude in academia today, but once upon a time it was considered cause for concern by educators outside the Scientology fold. If you need reminding (I did) the Church in fact licenses Hubbard’s “Tech” to many different institutions, as well as employing Hubbard’s tech in Criminon, Narconon, Youth for Human Rights International and other ostensibly charitable foundations.

_{O’Dea, via Wikipedia Commons}

Why do I tell you any of this? Is it to wave my hands about, should any of you be fellow Oregonians and say “OoOoHh SpOoKy!” No, I’m not the cops. Scientologists aren’t breaking any laws by having a school here, anyway. They’ve done a lot of dubious shit in the past which you’ve probably already heard all about, many of which were just cases of the blind leading the blind (like one member dying in a sauna from untreated dehydration and heat exhaustion, for which she was given…vitamin B) but much of it was indeed deliberate and sinister.

As an organization they do not fuck around. Neither does the US Government who they’re often accused of (credited with?) fighting for decades. I’m not sure if that’s really the slam dunk their critics believe it is. To anybody who knows even a tenth of the fucked up shit the US government has done, that sounds more like a feather in the church’s cap than cause for concern.

These days, with Portland and indeed many other cities across the nation looking the way they do, in terrifying turmoil worsened significantly by Covid, surely Criminon and Narconon are just what we need? At least somebody’s out there making some sort of persistent, dedicated attempt to address rampant criminality and hard drug addiction, right? What’s the harm in letting them try? What’s the harm in The Delphian School trying out a different way of teaching kids, for that matter?

_{Victor Gringas, via Wikipedia Commons}

That’s more or less the reasoning which has kept their detractors at bay for decades. They’re very good at tightrope walking across the uncanny valley, never quite presenting a clear enough danger to warrant intervention (with a few infamous exceptions). Most of the heads of this hydra wear friendly looking masks. What could be wrong with trying to get addicts off drugs? What could be wrong with trying to turn the lives of career criminals around? What could be wrong with a boarding school that teaches from non-traditional curricula?

The answer to all of these questions is best expressed as a sea captain pulling you out of stormy waters after your own sailboat sinks. You thank him dearly for saving your life, whereupon he sets course for the nearest iceberg. “What have you done that for?” you cry. “Now we’ll all drown!” to which he replies “Not so, dear friend! Can’t you see we’re aboard a rocket ship bound for the Moon?”

It all starts off very promising. Scientology really does look like it has all the answers, initially. Most of what they teach you in the entry level courses is also common sense advice you can find elsewhere. K-12 educators reading up on Study Tech will see a lot of familiar concepts, methods they have used themselves, with their own students.

The problems only begin to creep in later on, when distinctly Scientological ideas are introduced. Gently at first, sparsely sprinkled into the mix so the ratio of sensible knowledge to bonkers nonsense isn’t yet enough to trip your alarms.

_{MbDortmund, via Wikipedia Commons}

The ratio changes over time, like slowly boiling a frog. You’ve directly experienced the sensible teachings helping you in your own life, convincing you there’s definitely something to it all. So you press onwards, trying to rationalize away all the stuff about the Marcab Confederacy, Tegeeack, and L. Ron’s son recounting a past life as a clam after his father fed him amphetamines.

It’s very clear if you study the history of the church itself that the leaders are corrupt as hell and ‘in on it’, but it’s equally clear that most practicing Scientologists below leadership level are well intentioned people concerned by all the sickness, violence and depravity they see in the world. Scientology did a bang of job of presenting itself to these types as the foremost philanthropic movement out there on the scene, doing something about these problems that nobody else was trying.

These compassionate souls are the VMs, or Volunteer Ministers, who show up at major disasters like 9/11 to provide Scientology’s idea of ‘spiritual disaster relief’ which consists of ‘locationals’, ‘nerve assists’ and ‘touch assists’. These may, to us uncultured wogs, look like silly weirdos in matching brightly colored T-shirts lightly touching injured people, pointing to shit and asking them to repeat phrases.

_{Shaun F, via Wikipedia Commons}

As long as you know what you’re in for, enjoy the roller coaster ride of participating in ‘alternative religious movements’ and are good at keeping a tight grasp on your purse strings, None of this is necessarily a deal breaker. It’s been said you make more money as a cult leader but you have more fun as a member.

Whoever said that probably joined as an adult, though. As someone who spent his middle school and highschool years attending private Christian schools, one of which was of the evangelical variety teaching us young Earth creationism from the A.C.E. Curriculum, I feel qualified to speak on this topic. The Delphian School probably seems like a magical place to parents who chose Scientology as an adult and wished they had been raised in that tradition, hence the Hogwarts comparison.

Less so to their kids I’d wager, at least after they grow up, are exposed to the world outside of The Delphian School, and come to realize certain things about it (and their parents, by extension). That’s got to be a brain melting trip. On the one hand, their time on the inside must be a cozy feeling if they’re really into it. An insulated bubble, a bottle world that the stupid, depraved, simian normies of the world cannot intrude upon.

_{AutisticPsycho2 via Wikipedia Commons}

But if you aren’t into it? When you come out the other side, looking back over your shoulder, what do you see? Pardon me for all the weird analogies, but I’d compare that experience to finding out as an adult that when your parents taught you to cut up your turds with a knife, that wasn’t normal. It wasn’t…evil? Exactly? There’s nothing harmful about it. You just come to realize the people you trusted as infallible authorities were in fact mildly deranged.

Again I don’t at all mean to gloss over the existence of Scientology labor prison, labor and re-education camps to which you can be legally confined if you sign their billion year contract. But the kind of kid whose parents can afford to send them to The Delphian School isn’t likely to wind up in places like that. The Church has many faces, and not every member sees the same ones.

Cruel, brutal, and paranoid as the church has been at various well documented times during its history, and although I swear to myself I wouldn’t want to be the kid of Hollywood Scientologists stuck in The Delphian School or any similarly cloistered cultic bubble…I still sometimes catch myself day-dreaming about what that life would be like, once again on the inside gazing out.

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