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Geniuses Are Made, Not Born
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11524 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
3,328 Words |
| Author
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Jonathan D. Slevin
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Do you wish you could have grown up next door to Shakespeare? Or had as grammar school playmates little Lenny da Vinci and young Tom Edison? If talent like that of Johann S. Bach, Socrates, and John Milton were commonplace in your high school, might you not be eager to hear the school orchestra perform, watch the debate team, or read the literary magazine?
What if it we were the case that being the parents of such talented youngsters depended not upon some seemingly intangible and uncontrollable facts of heredity but upon parents' simply knowing how to each their children from birth to the age of six? This could revolutionize the basic components of our society: parents, children, and families.
For thirty years, a sometimes impatient man in Philadelphia has been insisting that such a revolution is under way. Every parent has the possibility of creating - and thus every child the potential of becoming - the genius that exists as a neurological birthright, he maintains.
The proponent of this vision, that there can now emerge what amounts to a new quality of humanity, is Glenn Doman, a specialist on child development and brain function. Smithsonian Magazine describes him as "the reigning prophet of the superbaby movement." Doman says that because you can teach a baby anything that you can present in an honest and factual way, and because facts are the base on which intelligence is built, it is easy to make a baby a genius prior to six years of age. All children should be geniuses, he says, and any literate mother can provide the gift of genius to her child.
Doman has written books (over two million copies have been sold) on the subject of brain function and human intelligence, with such titles as How to Multiply Your Baby's Intelligence, Teach Your Baby Math, What to Do about Your Brain-Injured Child, and his benchmark volume, How to Teach Your Baby to Read.
His studies result from the work of the research team at Philadelphia's Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, which the 67-year-old Doman founded forty years ago. This team of physicians, child developmentalists, educators, reading specialists, psychologists, brain surgeons, and physical therapists has devoted itself to understanding how a child's brain develops.
Their work is based upon an understanding of brain function and neurophysiology. The team initially sought to develop ways of providing effective treatment for brain-injured children. Primarily they questioned the almost universal assumption that nothing can be done about the brain itself. They found this assumption to be untrue. They learned that it is possible to relieve symptoms resulting from the brain injury, and that to do so they must direct treatment to the cause of the problem.
Thus if a stroke of a fall from a second-story window left someone with a paralyzed left arm, they did not advocate massaging the arm. Their bold approach was to seek a way to cure the paralysis. Thus they needed to find a way - a nonsurgical way - into the brain.
"At one point in the 1950s it dawned on us," writes Doman in What to Do about Your Brain-Injured Child, "that, whereas there was no way the physical therapist,
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