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There was a time when it was at least excusable to think of mentally retarded persons just in terms of what was then familiar to us, the mentally retarded child seemingly incapable of achievement, appealing forever for our love and above all for our protection. And that protection was most easily effectuated by continuing to treat the mentally retarded as children, by relieving them (that was our reasoning) of the burden and danger connected with adult status.

There is no longer any excuse for this. The basic premises on which this point of view was based have been proven unfounded. Years of hard, imaginative pioneering by parents and professional workers have resulted in many cases in a complete reversal of what had once been accepted as definitive knowledge. Thus children once considered ineducable are today educated in the public schools. Retarded adults, once considered unemployable, are working in the competitive market. And others, once considered totally dependent and incapable of even self-care, not only have mastered those skills but leave the shelter of their home and are productively occupied in activity centers. Since I have been privileged to become acquainted with mental retardation facilities and services in some 35 countries, I can attest to the fact that demonstration projects incorporating this new knowledge are not just limited to a few advanced countries. They literally can be found around the globe. Yet tradition has great force -- particularly so if it is linked to popular prejudice.

Thus, there has been considerable lag in the application of this new knowledge, both on the part of parents and on the part of professional persons. This latter point needs underlining. What is required is not just an effort to educate the parents and the general public with regard to the new dimensions of the problem of mental retardation; the professional practitioner, the college teachers, and the writers of textbooks used by the students need to be helped to shed old beliefs, and to recognize the faultiness of research studies previously accepted as definitive.

It is, of course, impossible to present to you a full account of all the new knowledge gained, and I must be content with a few examples. A good number of you are familiar with the fact that in the past it was generally believed that there was a group of individuals known as "profoundly retarded," of whom we accepted that they not only would never learn to dress themselves and to learn such elementary things as using the toilet, but we even accepted as a fact that once dressed they would not keep their clothes on. The number of institutions is steadily increasing where you will not find a single person running around naked or lying on the floor surrounded by urine and feces. On a higher functioning level, we now know that while reading and writing are useful skills, a person without them can still find his or her way about in the community along familiar routes, and can learn to handle public transportation. It was a cliche readily accepted by educators that only the mildly retarded were capable of any abstract thinking, of translating knowledge gained in one situation to another situation, and that of course implied that the others were incapable of making any decisions. This, too, has proven to be completely false. To be sure, in the traditional situation, whether at home, in school, or in the institution, every decision was made for persons with mental retardation; they had no opportunity of developing any capacity for making decisions. Today we know that even mentally retarded persons who may have difficulty in expressing themselves verbally with clarity nonetheless may well be able to make choices and act on the basis of these conscious choices, and that is what decision-making is all about.

However, it is not just our knowledge about the potential of the mentally retarded person that has changed. We have also gained some significant new insight regarding the requirements for functioning in a community setting. The traditional viewpoint focused on pointing out that, as life has become more complicated and more involved with mechanization and technology, retarded persons who were able to get along in the small community or rural area could no longer keep up with the increasing demands of modern living. There is increasing evidence that this is an oversimplification. Much of the new technology in effect assists the retarded person. He no longer needs to read the newspaper -- he gets extensive information through radio and television, and does so with far greater effectiveness than a slow reader perusing a newspaper. Shopping in self-service stores is manageable for a person with very limited language, and experience has proven that even the subway system of New York City, which overawes the visiting stranger, can be handled by a youngster formerly rejected by school systems as incapable of profiting from education. It is, of course, not my intention to convey that the disadvantage of an intellectual deficiency can be discounted. Being retarded is a substantial handicap. But its consequences are by no means as sweeping as previously depicted, nor is the retarded person as inaccessible to remediation as had been assumed.