Abstract
In the concise presentation of our program and its preliminary results we do not intend to offer a ‘cure-all’ method. We perceive it rather as an experimental endeavour in educational therapy with the intention of contributing to some of the pressing problems regarding the treatment of mentally subnormal children.
The improvement we observe in our children derived both from measurable data and clinical observation, points out that educational methodology when properly applied in educational therapy with mentally subnormal children — serves a twofold purpose:
1) Exposure to conditions which foster experiencing of primary cognitive functions help the child to develop better intentional and differentiative behaviour and facilitates more meaningful cognitive and functional relationships with the environment. As such it gives the professional worker insight into the basic problem in clinical psychology and special education, namely, the qualitative functional aspect of intelligence.
2) Exposure to the program proves to be a useful way to differentiate among clinical manifestations of different symptomatologies which, at the outset, are clustered around a general and diffuse behavioural and learning dysfunction.