ABSTRACT
B. Gates defines learning disability as a term that is used to describe a group of people with ‘significant developmental delay that results in arrested or incomplete achievement of the “normal” milestones of human development. This chapter identifies learning disability using a number of different classifications, and these have included legislative definitions, intellectual ability, social ability, and the cause of the learning disability. Learning disabilities are diverse and can be the result of a number of different causative factors. In 1959 the Mental Health Act introduced the terms ‘mental subnormality’, ‘severe mental subnormality’, ‘mental disorder’ and ‘psychopathic disorder’, and required local authorities to provide both day and residential services for people with a learning disability. Imitation is a powerful process, but most human models available for devalued people are fairly negative in that they are often segregated from valued social patterns and put together with other socially devalued people.
