When 'retard' stops being an insult

[bemildred]

Not I/P really, but ...

A personal interest of mine, as in I have personal experience with the issue, and I have always opposed the separation of children in schools, and the isolation of the "gifted" and the "ungifted" from the "normal" children. So credit where credit is due here, to Weizman School, for getting it right.

Last Tuesday, at Herzliya's Weizman elementary school, a group of children with moderate and serious mental retardation from the neighboring Ofek school arrived for a joint music class. Two or three of the Weizman students sit next to each Ofek student. The relationship is very close. These meetings began a few years ago, and they are now routine - just like helping with zippers, or taking an Ofek schoolgirl to the bathroom down the hall. Two Weizman students accompany her slowly and wait for her to return. Just then, a group of Weizman students is finishing its music lesson - at Ofek.

The activities with the Ofek school are just one aspect of Weizman's principles, which has been integrating special needs students for many years: Of its 425 students, 25 are in three special education classrooms and 40 more are fully integrated into regular classrooms, including children with cerebral palsy, Asperger's or Tourette's. Also among the school's students are about 50 immigrant children, a dozen children of foreign workers and a similar number of children whose mothers reside in the Herzliya shelter for battered women. The teaching staff is in touch with welfare authorities regarding about 20 percent of the student body. The school also has 75 gifted or outstanding students who receive enrichment activities. "Special needs are just part of our handling of the right to be different," says principal Sarah Oren.

Sixth-grader Daniel Yankelovitz talks about the joint activities with Ofek: "I have changed a little. When I was little, I didn't know there were kids like these, but now I know how important our activities are. We have the right to go to school and learn, and so do they. Kids in other schools don't understand that, they will run to the other side of the street when they see a mentally retarded child." There are signs that these are not just slogans. After two years of activities with Ofek, the teachers in Daniel's class noticed the kids stopped using the word "retard" as an insult. "Every child has compassion. They understand the world and themselves a little differently through meeting those who are different," Oren explains.

A third grade special education class includes children diagnosed with language acquisition difficulties. Once, these classes were held in basements or other buildings, instituting the separation. That day is past.

Haaretz

[terisan]

1. Wow! Thank you for bringing this up

I cringe when I see the word "retard" or other terms such as "cretin" used by liberal democrats-even to describe GW Bush. I know it is done in ignorance but it reveals, at the very least, a lack of respect and empathy and sometimes indicates a real prejudice.

[breakaleg]

2. "retard" is an insult. I think they should teach them to use a more appropriate word.

I thought this particular word had been banned in all school systems.

[twilight_sailing]

3. It's like prison rape jokes.

We like to think we are above it all...

[Shaktimaan]

4. While it is innappropriate, kids will be kids.

And kids will always appropriate whatever terminology is used to define the disabled, particularly the mentally disabled, in order to use as insults. I was curious about it and looked up the term "mental retardation" on wiki and it looks like some of our commonly used insults were once medical terms defining various shades of mental retardation. I find this heartening in a way. The medical establishment updates their terminology to fit new eras and new advances in understanding. Eventually the old word comes to mean something different than it used to. Interesting how language works.

Of course, my comments have nothing to do with this article, just with previous comments. What's going on at the Weizman school is commendable. It bears noting that Herzliyah is an extremely wealthy town, hopefully we will see more of this across the economic board. Not just in Israel, but everywhere.

The term "mental retardation" has acquired pejorative and shameful connotations over the last few decades and is now used almost exclusively in technical or scientific contexts where exactness is necessary.
In North America the broad term developmental delay has become an increasingly preferred synonym by many parents and direct support professionals. Elsewhere, however, developmental delay is generally used to imply that appropriate intervention will improve or completely eliminate the condition, allowing for "catching up." Importantly, this term carries the emotionally powerful idea that the individual's current difficulties are likely to be temporary.
Developmental disability is preferred by most physicians, but can also refer to any other physical or psychiatric delay, such as delayed puberty.
Both the phrases intellectual disability and learning disability are increasingly being used as a synonym for people with significantly below-average IQ.<2> These terms are sometimes used as a means of separating general intellectual limitations from specific, limited deficits as well as indicating that it is not an emotional or psychological disability. Intellectual disability is also used to describe the outcome of traumatic brain injury or lead poisoning or dementing conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. It is not specific to congenital conditions like Down syndrome.

Cretin is the oldest and probably comes from an old French word for Christian. The implication was that people with significant intellectual or developmental disabilities were "still human" (or "still Christian") and deserved to be treated with basic human dignity. This term has not been used in any serious or scientific endeavor since the middle of the 20th century and is now always considered a term of abuse. "Cretinism" is also used as an obsolescent term to refer to the condition of congenital hypothyroidism, in which there is some degree of mental retardation.
Idiot indicated the greatest degree of intellectual disability, where the mental age is two years or less, and the person cannot guard himself or herself against common physical dangers. The term was gradually replaced by the term profound mental retardation.
Imbecile indicated an intellectual disability less extreme than idiocy and not necessarily inherited. It is now usually subdivided into two categories, known as severe mental retardation and moderate mental retardation.
Moron was defined by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-minded in 1910, following work by Henry H. Goddard, as the term for an adult with a mental age between eight and twelve; mild mental retardation is now the term for this condition. Alternative definitions of these terms based on IQ were also used. This group was known in UK law from 1911 to 1959/60 as "feeble-minded."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retarded