ABSTRACT
The social services department or health authority would probably say that it was not undertaking a programme of educational activities to promote public acceptance of people with learning difficulties. Direct contact with people with disabilities can be a powerful educational experience, but it is not necessarily so. One common mistake is to include some feature in the design of the educational event or materials which implicitly contradicts the intended message. The traditional Christian explanation for a disabled child has been that it is a punishment for the sins of the parents. Prior to the introduction of the 1959 Mental Health Act, the categories into which 'the mentally defective' were legally divided included 'moral defectives' alongside 'the feebleminded' and 'imbeciles'. Furthermore leaflets and the mass media are obviously not ways to convey a message specifically and solely to one narrow target group, better, perhaps, to arrange personal contact with the group or its representatives.
