Library Collections: Document: Full Text

In any case, John remained in this group until at the age of fifteen when he was admitted for a temporary stay at a newly opened junior hostel in Oxford in order to allow his mother a brief vacation. I had the privilege to visit this hostel last year and it typifies a very important new development in England in a service area in which many of our states have done very little, if anything as yet. To the great surprise of everybody, John adjusted very well to the hostel and made some definite improvement in his ability for self help so when the time came for him to return home it was suggested that it might be very well if he could stay at the hostel for five days each week and spend his week-ends in the mother's home.

This was done and as a consequence he improved quite a lot in his general functioning but nevertheless six months after his admission to the hostel his rating on the Vineland scale was again only two years, two months, and on the Minnesota Pre-School scale, form A, he passed only one item for a non-verbal mental age of approximately two years and a verbal mental age of less than eighteen months. He still had no speech at all.

In other words, here was a young man with about as severe a mental retardation as one is likely to encounter in the community, who had had the benefit of a "training center" for ten years and whose minimal advance during all those years certainly would suggest a most dour prognosis.

Nevertheless, shortly after Oxford had opened this junior hostel, a new industrial training unit for the mentally handicapped was started and the director of the hostel strongly suggested that John be admitted to that. Naturally, this suggestion was received with greatest skepticism but, to the credit of all concerned, the youngster was so placed for a trial period.

For the first two days, the manager of the industrial training unit spent a great deal of time working directly with John and, in the beginning, had to hold his hands and force the action required for the simple task he was to do in stripping some plastic components. However, soon John began to dislike this and he began to work independently. After three weeks he had fully mastered this particular task, could be placed at a work table with other trainees and thus became a member of the working group. I cannot go into all the details of his continued adjustment but let me quote a few items about his subsequent work performance: During a typical morning's work, he was sorting plastic components of two shapes, the same color and about the same size. He worked slowly but steadily and during a half hour period, he sorted seven hundred items without making a single mistake. He also demonstrated that he could sort items by color and size. At a one point it was demonstrated that he remembered and could take up, without error, a working procedure which had been taught to him two to three months earlier but which he had not been engaged in for a considerable period of time.

Further testing still has resulted in a non-verbal mental age of between two and two and one half years. He still has no recognizable speech but can understand simple commands and recognizes his own name.

There are many other interesting details about this case which you can find in the article I have quoted, such as his ability to identify and correct mistakes which he is making in his work and his ability to react with appropriate motions when two boxes in which he is placing component parts are switched -- in other words, he would then switch his hand movements in order to continue to put the right part into the right box.

Time does not permit here to discuss other aspects of his adjustment. His placement in the hostel has made it possible to involve him in a program of recreation and of social activities but, in view of the vocational focus of this Institute, I have stressed his adjustment to the work process.

Unfortunately, I cannot show you a picture of John. But I do have pictures from a work training center for moderately and severely retarded young people in Slough, England, one that also has been described in literature and one I have visited many times during the past several years. You will see in these pictures a young man of similar low social development as John, totally without speech, with a minimal rating also on non-verbal tests. Yet this young man is able to work in a work training program for eight hours a day and to participate, even though on a minimum functional level, in the life of the hostel that is adjoining this particular workshop. As you will see from the pictures, many trainees in this workshop are capable of performing efficiently on machines and this, of course, so far has not been possible with either of these two young men nor can they participate in some of the advanced social training of which I show some illustrations such as learning to travel on public transportation, to make purchases, to use public telephones, and so on. Nevertheless, it is significant that individuals of this low capacity can learn to participate in a work program and through that work program and its stimulation can learn to participate in more satisfying social activities.