Shichida’s Philosophy

Makoto Shichida began designing his program of accelerated learning for very young children in the 1980s. The Shichida math program is based on the Doman program.

However, the Shichida program progresses much more rapidly than the Doman program. If more than a couple of days of a teaching cycle are missed, it will need to be restarted from the beginning.

For Shichida, the important thing is to develop and retain the abilities of the right hemisphere of the brain, or “genius brain,” which Shichida says most of us lose the habit of using around the time we start school.

Like the Doman program, the Shichida program begins by teaching numbers as quantities, before moving on to equations using quantities. Unlike Doman, Shichida provides a specific set of equations for parents to teach. Some might find this a bit rigid, while others will appreciate the certainty of knowing exactly what they are going to teach on a particular day.

For Shichida, the main aim of the math program is clear in its title: “Lightning Rapid Calculation.” Having completed both 65-day cycles twice, the child should be able to demonstrate “human calculator” type skills. The time it takes to achieve this adds up to 65 (days) x 2 (cycles) x 2 (repetitions) = 260 days, or 8.5 months.

Problems could arise when it is not possible to keep up the course on a daily basis. The need to restart a cycle could lead to frustration on the part of parents. More importantly, there is not much room for the child to have off days, when he simply doesn’t feel like his lessons.

As Janet Doman (director of the IAHP and Glenn Doman’s daughter) reminds us, “On a bad day you don’t touch [your teaching program] with a 50ft pole…”

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Doman’s method…