Glen Doman

It will not be an exaggeration to say that no early development method has caused so much controversy and controversy as Glen Doman's system. Among the opinions on his method of development, you can hear both rave reviews and severe criticism from teachers and parents.

Many people took on this work, received questionable results or did not receive them at all, saw reluctance, resistance of children against such a way of presenting information, as a result, infected from Doman with ideas of early development, changed the methodology beyond recognition and received their own, as, for example,known to many Cecil Lupan.

So who is he, Glen Doman - the greatest Teacher, who discovered a universal recipe for the education of geniuses, or simply the author of a questionable methodology around which a violent advertising campaign unfolded? Is it useful or harmful to deal with a child according to the Doman system?

Perhaps, it would seem strange to many that such a well-known method of "educating geniuses" was originally a rehabilitative one. At the end of the forties of the 20th century, US military neurosurgeon Glen Doman, working at the Philadelphia Institute, later named the Better Baby Institute( BBI), began treating children with brain injuries.

With the help of external stimuli, he tried to stimulate the "reserve" cells of the brain, not affected by the disease. To children began to fix the sight, they began to show cards with painted red dots, gradually increasing their number and intensity of training. Then - words, pictures. The whole lesson took 5-10 seconds, but there were several dozens of such lessons per day. The method worked.

The conclusions to which Doman and his colleagues came can be schematically described as follows: by stimulating one of the senses, one can achieve a sharp increase in brain activity as a whole.

As a neurophysiologist, Doman made a unique discovery: the brain develops only if it works. And the more intense the load on the baby's brain in the first years of his life, the better his intellect will develop. The more the baby is encouraged to move from birth, the faster the formation of the brain, the more perfect and mature will be his cells and the higher( in Doman's terminology) will be his motor intellect. This means that the baby will start crawling, sitting, walking himself much earlier than usual. And as soon as the child masteres this or that motor skill, the next higher brain region begins to develop. Well, the faster the formation of higher departments( and especially the cortex) of the brain, the smarter and smarter your baby will be.

The creative possibilities of children studying under the system of the Institute for the Accelerated Development of the Child are so wide that Doman himself called them the children of the Renaissance.