Mother's Service Society, Pondicherry has been in the field of social development for a quarter of a century now and has been recognised as a "Scientific and Cultural Research Institution" by the Central Government for three decades. The Society has longed believed that new methods of education can transform India into a leading knowledge society and fulfil Sri Aurobindo's dream of India becoming the Jagat guru of the world. Primrose School was founded for this purpose, and after discovering the wonderful educational insights of Dr. Glenn Doman, they have taken them and creatively adapted them to suit Indian conditions.
Most of us believe that geniuses are a very rare breed and only a few children are born with that potential. The truth is, many children have the potential of developing genius. Every child has far more potential than comes to the surface under normal circumstances. The secret is to create conditions that enable the child to discover and express their full potential.
Dr. Doman has shown decisively that young children have an incredible capacity for learning. They can learn to read multiple languages with ease at a very young age, even before entering school. They can imbibe a wide range of general knowledge just as a form of recreation. Children can learn at least twice as fast as they normally do in traditional schools without homework, cramming or strain of any type.
Dr. Doman concluded that the first six years of life are a time when children learn naturally, spontaneously, effortlessly and joyously - as a form of play - and that the more opportunities the child has for learning during this period, the more rapidly he learns and the greater his capacities for learning. The younger the child, the greater the capacity to learn. Every child's natural ability to learn far exceeds what we are tapping, because of the deficiency in our teaching methods.
Dr. Doman has said, "Reading is the very basis of all learning and the acquisition of knowledge, and if a mother teaches her child to read at one, two, or three years of age, he will not fail to learn to read in school at six, seven, or eight years of age. Literacy and success go hand-in-hand, and illiteracy and failure go hand-in-hand. This is true in nations, in states, in cities, and in neighborhoods, and is especially true in individuals.
The truth is that we expose children to reading too late. By six years of age the ability to take in raw facts, whether auditory (spoken) or visual (written), without the slightest effort is just about gone. If children did not hear words until they were six years old, we would have another staggering educational problem to match the present staggering reading problem and a flood of books with titles like Why Johnny Can't Talk.
It is easier to teach a five-year-old to read than it is to teach a six-year-old. It is easier at four than at five, easier at three than four, easier at two than at three, easier at one than at two and easiest of all (for the baby) below one.
The superb truth is that babies take in raw facts such as written and spoken words at a rate that no adult could come close to matching. "
Our present educational methods tap and develop only a very small portion (at best 5%) of human capacity. Each child is a potential genius, with unique capacities. The system should be capable of recognizing this and drawing it out. The programmes at Dr. Doman's Institute are propagated to begin with three week babies and go on till the child is five years. By then, the child can be well into reading books beyond his level.
The Mother's Service Society believes that this method could revolutionalise education in India. At the request of Dr. M. Anantakrishnan, Vice Chancellor of Tamil Nadu State Council for Higher Education, the Society presented a strategy to the Confederation of Indian Industry to accelerate primary education in rural areas and computer-based technical education in urban secondary schools. These recommendations were part of the Society’s continuing work on alternative methods of education.
