Moderate Intellectual Disability

Moderate Intellectual Disability

Moderate Intellectual Disability

Although disability studies have offered different ways to conceptualize difference in educational and other contexts, intellectual disability continues to be theorized via a deficit model where persons with intellectual disabilities are characterized as having significant limitations both in intellectual functioning and in adaptive behavior as expressed in conceptual, social, and practical adaptive skills (the AAMR definition). On the other hand, sociologists such as Bogdan and Taylor, Braginsky and Braginsky, and Mercer have argued that the term mental retardation is a defective and crude metaphor that tends to club together disparate and amorphous behaviors and conditions to define in absolute terms the pathology of mental retardation. Although not denying that there may be “real” differences in intellectual ability among individuals, they argue that measures of these intellectual differences, such as IQ and adaptive behavior scales, offer only an imprecise and often restricted sample of the wide range of intellectual functions and behaviors. Moreover, they argue that linking the social construct of intellectual disability with biological inferiority is a modern myth derived from social practices that draw on pathological/behaviorist discourses to exert social control on bodies and minds that refuse such control.

To explain why Western society, unable to effectively regulate difference, has sought to expunge or at least distance itself from it, philosopher Etienne Balibar uses the term prophylaxis—the need to preserve one's own identity from all forms of mixing, interbreeding, or invasion; this creates the icon of the “other body,” which must be excluded from “normal” life. Thus, since the early twentieth century, people with intellectual disabilities—often described as morons, imbeciles, and the feeble-minded—were sometimes exposed to the violence of eugenics, seen as a parasitic and predatory class that was a menace and danger to the community. These same ideologies interpenetrated the educational discourses of the early twentieth century, when the enforcement of compulsory education laws forced common schools to educate immigrant children who were not so easily socialized into accepting the prevailing norms. Rather than explaining these difficulties as societal (e.g., poverty, illiteracy, etc.), the schools located these difficulties in the child, who was described as physically, morally, or intellectually defective.

Thus, the first special education classes contained over-age children, so-called naughty children, and the dull and stupid children for whom school had little or nothing to offer. The introduction of special education classes constructed a bifurcated school system—one for “special” students with educational handicaps and one for “normal” students—what can be seen as a thinly disguised way to preserve the status quo. Those students with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities, unable to effectively transform themselves into what society saw as productive citizens, were often segregated in large, state-run institutions situated on self-sustaining campuses.

The 1954 Brown decision and 1960s civil rights legislation made disabled people, their families, and their advocates increasingly aware of the injustice of exclusion based solely on physiological/intellectual differences. They contended that educational segregation on the basis of disability was also an unconstitutional practice. Similar to Brown, two landmark cases of 1972, ...