Intellectual Disabilities Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Intellectual Disabilities - Essay Example Difficulties with assessment and classification are discussed. Finally the education of children particularly with mild to moderate disabilities is discussed. Several programs and strategies that have been developed to teach children with intellectual disabilities are reported on. In order to examine and understand the about Intellectual Disabilities it is first helpful to define the term. However even before coming to a definitive definition we need to know something of the history of this term and how the thinking about intellectual disabilities has changed over the years. Specifically we need to know the connection between mental retardation, learning disabilities and intellectual disabilities. In the early 1800s J.Langdon Hayden Down proposed a classification of intellectual disabilities based on ethnic classification in an attempt to absolve parents from blame that it was their fault that their child was intellectually disabled. This was not accepted and was abandoned by Hayden who later proposed three major groups of classification. One was congenital where intellectual disability was caused by brain defects or epilepsy. The second was developmental classification due to stress occurring during a developmental crisis. And the third was accidental as a r esult of an injury or illness in early childhood. This was later developed into the brain pathology theory of the 1880s and led to the 19th century theories that realized that intellectual disability had multiple causes and various levels of disability (Harris, 2005). Over the years there have been several terms used to describe intellectually disabilities including words such as idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness and mental deficiency. As Meservy (2008) explains because the name mental retardation has been associated with such negative connotation efforts have been made to move away