The School of Developmental Education
As with so many of my father’s accomplishments, they begin with a child with brain injury winning. In the 1960s, Dr. Robert Morris, who was the President of the University of Dallas, brought his son with brain injury to my father. His son was what the world would call “cognitively disabled”. He looked like any other child except his understanding, speech, and social abilities were of a child many years younger. Dr. and Mrs. Morris did a fine program and their son made remarkable progress.
Dr. Morris was a visionary. As an educator he realized, because of his son, and what he had learned from my father, that there are thousands of young people who will never go to university. The world thinks that they are either bad students, or stupid. They are not intellectually impaired. They are mildly or moderately injured in the central nervous system. This prevents them from being able to compete successfully with their peers. This is an even bigger problem today than it was 60 years ago. These young people often have social problems, or worse, get in trouble with the law. Their self-esteem is low because they know that others consider them to be unintelligent and not capable of being “average”.
My father’s work has saved thousands of these young people from lives of failure. By treating the core problem of brain injury, the symptoms of cognitive dysfunction disappear. These children show their natural intelligence and compete successfully with their peers, thus never having social problems.
Dr. Morris understood this. He resigned his position at the University of Dallas to create a new university. This university was more than 60 years ahead of its time. He incorporated it as the University of Plano. Outside Dallas, there was inexpensive farmland in a tiny place called Plano. Dr. Morris envisioned his university there. He had wealthy oil and businessmen as friends. He twisted their arms so they would donate the large amount of money necessary to create the university. He knew the real estate market well and bought a huge tract of farmland. The community was overjoyed to know it was going to be blessed with its own university. This would also increase the value of their property.
Through his many contacts, Dr. Morris was able to purchase buildings that were part of the New York World’s Fair of 1964. One was the Malaysian building. There were two parts to Dr. Morris’s vision, which was genius. The mission of the University of Plano was to have a standard university with standard curriculum. In addition, there was the School of Developmental Education. This school was exclusively for young college-age students who had neurological problems that were stopping them from being able to get into any college or university.
Dr. Morris asked my father to be responsible for the neurological evaluation and curriculum for the School of Developmental Education. The mission was for the students to improve neurologically and cognitively and then transition into the standard university curriculum. This was a brilliant idea. It is desperately needed today around the world. This novel idea could be used to permit hundreds of thousands of young people the opportunity to thrive and prosper in university and life. The savings to society and taxpayers would be enormous. Young people who cannot hold down an advanced job or may fall out of grace with the law would not cost society, but instead, would be part of the solution.
Dr. Morris’ other genius was in real estate. He bought way more property than he needed. Dallas was growing and Plano’s farms would become suburbs. This meant the land value would be constantly increasing. Whenever the University of Plano needed funds, Dr. Morris could sell off the land at a considerable profit and use the money to grow and improve the university. He knew he could only use this strategy for a few years. He would eventually run out of land. Being the brilliant visionary he was, he understood that Southern Baja, in California and Mexico, was a beautiful, undeveloped area with beautiful beaches on the Baja east coast and the Pacific Ocean west coast. The idea was to create an international university where American students could study in Mexico and Mexican students could study in the US. He and his investors bought thousands of acres around Cabo San Lucas.
This was a very difficult proposition as it was illegal for Americans to own beach front property in Mexico in the 1960s. My father’s institute bought five hundred acres with hundreds of yards of beach front on the Pacific. When I graduated from high school, I was hired, along with four of my friends, by the University of Plano to make a road from the public road through Dr. Morris’ property and the Institute’s property to the beach. This was the beach owned by the Institutes. For five young guys, it was a great job to have. The Institutes had a Dodge motorhome which was top of the line at the time. It had been shipped to Africa and was driven up the Alcan Highway to Fairbanks, Alaska during research expeditions my father conducted. This is where we stayed.
Making the road was incredibly easy. Basically, Southern Baja is almost a desert. There are cacti and small bushes. It was necessary to either drive around them or cut the small bushes down. There was no way the five of us would dare attack a cactus. Late in the afternoon, we broke through to the beach. As we walked along the beach that night, we realized that we had never been on a beach where there were absolutely no lights to be seen. This was in 1971. That’s how undeveloped Baja was at that time. By the way, that was also the last beach that I’ve ever been on where there were no lights.
Sadly, in 1975, there was a crash in land values around Dallas. This put the university in grave danger financially. It would be many years before the Baja land values began to increase. Dr. Morris was planning for the far future. Unfortunately, his Plano and Baja properties could not pull the university out of the difficult financial situation it was in. The university’s failure is hugely tragic because thousands of young people could have been helped by it had it survived to this day.
As the university made plans to shut its doors, my father and Dr. Morris agreed that the students in the School of Developmental Education could transfer to the campus of the Institutes in Philadelphia, which occurred in September of 1973. At that time, the Institutes had constructed a new clinic and auditorium to accommodate the increased number of families enrolling in my father’s program. The old clinical building was available to be refurnished as a dormitory for the students. Although the medical and clinical staff would oversee the neurological evaluation and program of each student, my father hired young educators to oversee the students completing the neurological and physical program.
By the spring of 1974, the school was not going well. The thirty to forty young people with neurological problems did not respect their teachers and their teachers really didn’t respect them either. The teachers were not certified Child Brain Developmentalists. They didn’t truly understand the students’ potential and provide them with the respect they deserved. In May of that year, I was returning home from college and my father asked to meet with me. He explained that the School for Human Development was not going as it should. He was contemplating closing it. There was a small group of eight students remaining for the summer semester. He planned to totally revise the curriculum and the operations of the school. He offered me the opportunity, as a summer job, to make these changes. At the end of the summer, he said it would be my decision whether the school was to close or open for the return of the other students in September.
This was a challenge I couldn’t refuse. Although I was not a staff member at the time, I had grown up and often played in the treatment room. I observed the staff working with adults with brain injuries and then with children with brain injuries. Whenever my father was having creative conversations with medical staff or scientists, which often took place in our living room, I was there listening. It was the most exciting part of my education. College was boring by comparison.
My father had employed me as a kind of assistant to himself and the clinical and medical staff when they went on expeditions to study child development in different cultures around the world. When I was 12, I went with the staff to study child rearing in the southwest US. When I was 14, I traveled with the staff to Point Hope, Alaska to live with and study the Inuit parents and their children. At 17, I traveled to the Kalahari Desert in Botswana to study the bush people and their children’s development.
In addition, at age 14, I had attended the Initial Certification and Evaluation Program. These were two days of very intense lectures to teach new parents the whys and hows of Child Brain Development. These lectures provided a basic understanding of what the Doman Method is. That summer of 1974, my father coached me in the process of totally updating the school’s program.
Written by: Douglas Doman