Historical Context

The following section is also from the DCD Manual and is remixed from the Minnesota Department of Education.

The following section provides a brief overview of the history of ID that will help us as we situate our learning about supporting students with ID in today’s classrooms. The fate of individuals with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) has always depended on the customs and beliefs of the time, place, and culture in which we have lived. Mental retardation has been defined and renamed many times throughout history. Terms such as feebleminded, imbecile, moron, and idiot, which we find offensive today, were once standard. Over time, they were replaced by terms such as educable, trainable, and custodial. These terms were eventually replaced by words such as borderline, mild, moderate, severe, and profound. The history of African Americans in special education is entangled with the history of ID and ideas about impairment (Mayes, 2022). Current descriptions focus on the level of support that an individual needs rather than on their deficits. The following section provides a brief overview of the history of ID that will help us as we situate our learning about supporting students with ID in today’s classrooms.

The concept of mental retardation existed as far back as 1500 B.C.E. Documents from this period refer to disabilities of the mind and body due to brain damage. Infanticide of defective newborns was common in ancient Greece and Rome. In Sparta, for example, all newborns were inspected by a state council of inspectors. If they suspected that a child was disabled, the infant was thrown from a cliff to its death.

In the Roman Empire during the second century C.E., adults and children with disabilities were frequently sold to be used for entertainment or amusement. The spread of Christianity led to a decline in these barbaric practices and a movement toward care for the less fortunate. All prominent world religious leaders, including Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Mohammed, have advocated humane treatment for the mentally retarded, developmentally disabled, or the infirm. In medieval Europe, the status and care of individuals with mental retardation varied greatly. Despite decreased infanticide and the establishment of foundling homes, many children were still sold into slavery, abandoned, or left out in the cold.

The work of Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, a French physician who lived in the early 1800s, was a turning point in the care and treatment of the mentally retarded. Itard developed a broad educational program for a student who was “deaf and mute.”  The program consisted of developing the student’s senses, intellect, and emotions. Itard’s followers expanded his concept of a direct relationship between cognition and the senses to incorporate sensory training that included vision, hearing, taste, smell, and eye-hand coordination. The curriculum extended from developing basic self-care skills to vocational education, emphasizing perception, coordination, imitation, positive reinforcement, memory, and generalizations.

One of Itard’s followers, Edouard Séguin, came to the United States in 1850 and became a driving force in educating individuals with mental retardation.  In 1876, he founded the organization that would later become the American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR).

Within the next 50 years, two key developments occurred in the United States: residential training schools were established in most states by 1892. Binet’s newly developed intelligence test was translated by Henry Goddard and published in an American version in 1910. In 1935, the Vineland Maturity Scale was developed to assess the daily living skills and adaptive behavior of individuals suspected of having mental retardation. At that time, psychologists and educators believed it was possible to determine who had mental retardation and provide them with appropriate training in residential training schools.

These training schools proliferated during the early part of the 20th century. This occurred due to the availability of tests, primarily IQ tests, to diagnose mental retardation and the belief that, with proper training, individuals with mental retardation could be “cured.” However, these schools became overcrowded when they could not cure mental retardation. Many students were moved back into society, where the educational focus became special education classes in the community. The training schools became custodial living centers.

Caregivers and advocates became disillusioned with the residential treatment model, especially after learning that many people with intellectual disabilities served bravely in World War II. Public perceptions shifted as they realized that not all intellectual disabilities were severe. Even those with the most severe cases can lead fulfilling lives with appropriate nurturing. All this led, in part, to Congress in 1975 passing the Education of All Handicapped Children Act, now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law guaranteed free and appropriate public education to all children with disabilities, including ID, from school age through 21. This law was amended in 1986 to guarantee education services to children with disabilities aged 3 through 21 and provided incentives for states to develop infant and toddler service delivery systems.

However, students of color were victimized and further oppressed by laws that should have been designed to support them in achieving their dreams. During the post-World War II era, Black students began attending White schools due to civil rights laws. However, White educators began segregating Black students within White schools. These White schools and districts labeled many African American students as “educatable mentally retarded’ (EMR) or “mildly mentally retarded” (MMR) based on results of IQ tests that were known to be biased (see the “Identification” section for more information about IQ tests). Others began using IQ tests to draw links among intellectual ability, race, gender, and social class, leading to highly contentious claims that some groups of people were inherently less intelligent than others (Hampshire et al., 2012). In the 1970s, White teachers and school administrators began to identify Black students as “learning disabled” (LD), then increasingly as “emotional/behavior disordered” (EBD) in the 1980s and 1990s. Some argue that White psychologists created additional special education categories with some racial specificity during this time. This led to the present-day overidentification and placement of Black students across all special education categories, resegregating them in America’s public schools (Mayes, 2022).