C I M R

Comprehension, Competence, Creativity or Three Cs make up the corner stone of all activities at CIMR.

This is an educational approach evolved by Rev. Fr. Thomas Felix CMI. Three Cs has charted a new course in the training, education and normalizations of the mentally challenged. By understanding and recognizing basic shapes and colors as alphabets of the universe, Fr. Felix was pioneering an extraordinary concept. The mentally challenged are taught living and vocational skills by teaching them to know, make, select and combine shapes! Three Cs are three steps towards total development of the mind. From concrete stimulus (seeing, feeling, touching, and other sensory inputs) not only the mentally challenged but even normal human minds can be brought to understand abstract ideas such as linguistic alphabets and mathematical numbers.

We are all aware of shapes and forms. The most universal of all phenomena in nature are the four basic shapes of circle, rectangle, triangle and square. Shapes appear and stare at us from human and animal bodies, plants, trees, stone quarries, mechanical devices, buildings .... in just about everything around us! Fr. Felix discovered that the mentally challenged, though averse to the conventional alphabets, can easily recognize and interact with these simple 'alphabets of shapes'. They keep on interacting with concrete things in nature, which then leads them to abstract knowledge. Nature is an open book easily accessible to all people in the world. Nature is mother and teacher to them all. As the human child interacts with the concrete forms in this book of nature, shapes, which are an integral part of all forms and which can be termed as the universal alphabet of nature, and the colors that go with all shapes, become accessible to the person and become guide posts also. At home, at bus stops, at super markets, in temples and churches, in the garden, in schools and just about everywhere else they go, shapes and the attendant colors surround them, and the learning process through these media proceeds quietly without strain or effort. It is also inexpensive, accessible to the poorest of the poor, everywhere!

From knowing shapes a mentally challenged person is logically and automatically taken to the next step -- that of making shapes. Selecting shapes and combining shapes, using the four basic shapes of circle, rectangle, triangle and square, we can stimulate a mentally challenged person to attain growth and development in the four basic human functions, viz. motor, psychosocial, language and cognitive. This revolutionary approach helps the mentally challenged person to move forward in the path of comprehension, which with time and experience gives that person competency, and further onwards to the arena of creativity.