Mentally Retarded and Culturally Deprived Children: Some Parallels

Abstract

DURING THE LAST seventeen years, there has been a remarkable development of programs for handicapped children. Tremendous modifications in the kinds of programs provided have also occurred. To a very great extent, these changes have been the result of new knowledge. There is good reason to believe that the need for such change will continue. The concepts of mental retardation and the possible similarities of the condition to other areas of exceptionality are an example. This paper is concerned with a type of mental retardation and its similarities to a condition which was fully born, as far as the literature goes, in 1962, when Frank Reissman's Culturally Deprived Child was published. The type of mental retardation frequently referred to as primary, simple, familial, or cultural is usually thought to exist without neurological basis but to be the result of economic and educational deprivation. The older idea of mental retardation as a permanent condition is slowly giving way to the notion that some mental retardation is a symptom, and like any symptom, may be transient. This notion has been advanced by Kirk,' Gallagher,2 and Cruickshank, who, among others, have attempted to show that subnormal mental functioning does not necessarily result from limited mental capacity. When I. Q. is used as a major criterion in identifying mentally retarded children, recent estimates indicate that the number of children in the 7080 I. Q. range coming from low-income and culturally disadvantaged homes is in excess of 50 percent. Just as there are many definitions of the mentally retarded, depending upon the profession, the geographic location, and the biases of the definer, so with definitions of the culturally deprived. There is general agreement, however, that the culturally deprived are poor and that they are handicapped in the tasks of living competently in a complex, urban, industrial, middle-class society. According to Taba and Elkins, these children generally show poor performance in school. They have low I. Q., poor health, a high proportion of failure, of dropouts, of reading and other learning disabilities, and of life-adjustment problems.4 Martin Deutsch, who has studied and worked extensively with cultur-