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Who Are The Mentally Retarded?

Creator: Gunnar Dybwad (author)
Date: July 17, 1967
Source: Friends of the Samuel Gridley Howe Library and the Dybwad Family

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It was a happy state of affairs, indeed. All we needed was a psychometrician to provide us with an I.Q. and, presto, we not only knew to which of the three levels of mental retardation to assign the person in question, we also could look up from charts one could find in textbooks just what could be expected from such a person. And since I.Q.'s were believed to be fixed, that was that.

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But then came disturbing new discoveries -- for one thing, I.Q.'s as an expression of the person's intellectual functioning were found subject to distinct changes, if conditions in his life changed to a sufficient degree. And secondly, it was realized that along with the measured intelligence, social adaptation was a crucial factor in judging the degree of a person's mental retardation.

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And how has our practice in health, welfare and rehabilitation agencies responded to this? Quite remarkably by ignoring this new knowledge and by continuing to use the old so comfortable and convenient terms and concepts, ignoring the factor of social adaptation and basing our terminological judgements entirely on the measured I.Q.

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At this point it is necessary to refer to educational practice which unfortunately confounded this situation even more. In the 1950's, educators in our country commendably sought to widen school programs for the mentally retarded beyond the classes existing for the mildly retarded. It was felt that for those of still less intellectual endowment quite different methods of teaching were indicated and the distinction was made that while the upper group of mildly retarded was capable of profiting from an "educational" process, the lower group could only be "trained" in simplest tasks, were incapable of rational thinking and unable to absorb any academic skills.

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Hence the terms educable and trainable came into use. We cannot discuss here today the fallacy of this presumed clear-cut dichotomy in teaching methodology. What is important to bring out here is that shoddy thinking brought about a significant perversion in the use of these terms. Originally, they described two types of schooling, but by no means did anyone suggest that all children with an I.Q. of between twenty-five and forty-nine would be capable of profitably attending classes on the trainable level. Yet, by and by, more and more practitioners and authors simply referred to all children between twenty-five and forty-nine I.Q. as "trainable", with the result, of course, that we had trainable children which were found by the school to be untrainable, i.e., inadmissible to these classes. But worse yet, some workers in rehabilitation, health and welfare referred to post-school youth and also to adults as educable and trainable depending solely on whatever I.Q. score showed up in their record. And this practice continues to the present day in spite of the fact that there is not a single workshop or rehabilitation center which has not experienced that school performance, in an educable or a trainable class, is by no means a reliable predictor of performance in the workshop where quite different skills are demanded under quite different circumstances.

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Another remnant from the static period of mental retardation is the unfortunate misunderstanding of a psychological concept, namely that of mental age. Intelligence tests are built on a succession of sub-tests, corresponding to the performance which can be expected from the average child aged three, four, five years and so on. It is therefore entirely justified to say that a certain twenty-year-old individual scored on a certain part of an intelligence test not higher than would be expected of a three-year-old child. It is much more open to question when we combine this twenty-year-old person's ratings on various test items and say that he scored on these tests as would be expected of a child of three and one half years of age, because what actually happened is that on some he scored as low as a two-year-old, perhaps on others as high as a six-year-old.

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Experience has proven that most people are being misled by hearing that a person has a mental age of three and one half because they do not keep in mind that this is essentially the result of a mathematical averaging of a large number of test items. From this they move on to a far more insidious misconception -- namely, that this man, twenty years old, is like a child of three and one half and therefore should be treated like such a child.

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This is, of course, absolute and disastrous nonsense because there are no three-year-old children who are five feet seven inches tall and weigh one hundred and sixty pounds, have had twenty years of some kind of social life experience, have adult sexual organs, and have the strength to stand for several hours lifting heavy logs onto a truck. Mentally retarded persons are not "eternal children" and this sentimental way of referring to them as such is an insult to their dignity as human beings.

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One more point needs to be highlighted. Mental retardation is not infrequently associated with other handicaps, particularly those in the physical area. Sensory disturbance, crippling orthopedic conditions, cardiac and respiratory irregularities, neurological defects, deficiencies in motor coordination and muscle tone -- they all may substantially impair a mentally retarded child's social adaptation and also deprive him of opportunities for intellectual stimulation.

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