At one point in the video, Glen Doman proclaimed that genetics are rubbish. He thought geniuses could be taught and said, “All children have the capacity to become geniuses.”
Another point he made was that, “All mothers make the best teachers.” Even though I personally agree with this, I did not like it when he insisted that mothers should stay at home and devote their time to teaching their children. This is a good idea because children are comfortable and familiar with their mothers but I did not approve when he said, “Any mother that does not want to do that, is a bad mother.” I totally disagree with this. If the women wanted to become teachers, they would have chosen it as their profession. Maybe they need to spend their time on important things such as housekeeping, cooking and cleaning, domestics that would not get done by themselves. I am not implying that their child’s education is not important but there are professionals being paid to do that anyway.
From what I am aware of already about hot housing, I completely and totally am against it. There is almost nothing that I approve of. The babies are like some mechanic computer that is made to store information by memorising words and sounds. When they were shown reading complicated words off a flashcard, I think that they had just learnt it off by heart, what the word is, what it sounds like and how to say it. I’m almost sure that they have no awareness of what the words mean or what it is.
I admire ‘normal’ education that I grew up along. Everything makes sense the way it is. The first few years of a child’s life should be spent having fun and adapting to the world around them. ‘Normal’ education satisfies this, where children go to nursery in primary school. Here, they learn basic things like the names of colours and letters in the alphabet and writing their name. However, it isn’t all work. They also enjoy themselves by playing and participating in different activities such as cooking and cleaning games, house and pretend games, Lego and building blocks etc. Moreover, this only goes on for a few hours during the weekday, instead of 24 hours a day like hot housing. This means that there is no stress on the children and they can just relax by learning and enjoying themselves at the same time.
Nevertheless, the people claimed that those hot-housing have the time of their lives. Both the parents and children enjoy themselves. I don’t think they even asked the children what they think and just assumed they are enjoying themselves. The children probably don’t even know there is an alternative to the way they are currently being taught.
Some children don’t attend the school on a regular basis – they live there! They wear rainbow-coloured uniforms and take part in a number of strenuous and boring activities. Some are even pointless things, like crawling for several miles. This is thought to work with areas of the brain that determine high intelligence – which I think is a load of rubbish! They learn Japanese as a foreign language and play instruments but the one that angered me a lot was the gymnastics they have to learn – to Olympic Standards! That is a large amount of stress to put upon a child.
Still, some of the things they were doing really impressed me, especially the part when they are playing a violin and follow the leader at the same time. I would not be able to play an instrument fluently let alone do other things along with it at the same time. They showed something else that was meant to be impressive but it did not impress me at all. It was when the woman played a CD and asked the child to name the composer. She answered correctly but I think she had just memorised the answer and probably wasn’t really aware of what the purpose of music is, or what a composer is. In her mind, she was just focused on remembering what answer goes with what sound.
So overall, I definitely do not agree with hot housing. There were only a few things that impressed me but mostly, the things just made me angry. Especially the way the mothers were happy to be respected because of their children’ brains. A mother should be proud of her child no matter what.
