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Wilbur (as quoted in Journal of Insanity, 1852, p. 31 ff.) stated:

"We do not propose to create or supply faculties absolutely wanting; nor to bring all grades of idiocy to the same standard of development or discipline; nor to make them all capable of sustaining, creditably, all the relations of a social and moral life; but rather to give to dormant faculties the greatest practicable development, and to apply those awakened faculties to a useful purpose under the control of an aroused and disciplined will.

"But great as are the benefits of education in ordinary cases, its achievements are still greater when, instead of increasing the capacities of the pupils, it substitutes capacities for incapacities; when it restores a class of human beings, now a burden to community, destitute of intelligence, degraded and miserable, to their friends and to society, more capable of development, under the ordinary circumstances of human development; nearer the common standard of humanity, in all respects; more capable of understanding and obeying human laws; of perceiving and yielding to moral obligations; more capable of self-assistance, of self-support, of self-respect, and of obtaining the greatest degree of comfort and happiness with their small means."

The institution was seen as a temporary boarding school. After the child was improved so as to have mastered skills necessary in society, he was to be returned to his family and/or the regular schools. It certainly was not the intent of the pioneers that the institution should become a permanent home. For example, Samuel Gridley Howe said in 1851 of what is now Fernald State School: "This establishment, being intended for a school, should not be converted into an establishment for incurables" (Journal of Insanity, 1852, p. 270). "The early teachers of the feeble-minded jealously guarded their schools from the danger of becoming asylums. Admission was restricted to those classed as improvables..." (Johnson, 1898, p. 465). The institution was seen as ". . .a link in the chain of common schools -- the last indeed, but still one necessary in order to make the chain embrace all the children in the state" (Howe, 1852, pp. 15-16). The 1851 bylaws of the first mental retardation institution in New York, opened by Wilbur, are reported to have stated:

"The design and object of the asylum . . . are not of a custodial character but are to furnish all the means of education to that portion of the youth of the state not provided for in any of its other educational institutions . . . Those only will, therefore, be received . . . who are of a proper school attending age, children between the ages of seven and fourteen, who are idiotic and who are not epileptic, insane nor greatly deformed."

The pioneers also made efforts to distinguish between more and less modifiable retardates. Generally, children with symptoms of severe brain injury and with multiple handicaps were not viewed as good prospects (e.g., Howe, 1848; Seguin, 1870). "The most favorable subjects for training, as a general thing, are those who enjoy good bodily health, who are free from epileptic and other fits, and whose heads are not enlarged" (Howe, 1852, p. 12). "The institution is not intended for epileptic or insane children, nor for those who are incurably hydro-cephalic or paralytic, and any such will not be retained, to the exclusion of more improvable subjects" (Howe, 1852, p. 36). Seguin, after thirty years' experience, was reported to have said: "Idiots have been improved, educated, and even cured. Not one in a thousand has been entirely refractory to treatment, not one in a hundred who has not been made more happy and healthy. More than 30 per cent have been taught to conform to moral and social laws, and rendered capable of order, of good feeling, and of working like the third of a man. More than 40 per cent have become capable of the ordinary transactions of life under friendly control, of understanding moral and social abstractions, or working like two-thirds of a man; and 25 to 30 per cent have come nearer and nearer the standard of manhood, till some of them will defy the scrutiny of good judges, when compared with ordinary young men and women" (Seguin, as quoted by Carson, 1898, pp. 294-295).

It thus appears that only some retardates were seen to be proper candidates for institutional education, and this education was to consist mostly of the transformation of poorly socialized, perhaps speechless, and uncontrolled children into children who could stand and walk normally, have some speech, eat in an orderly manner, and engage in some kind of meaningful work. It should be kept in mind that perhaps this was equivalent to near-normality in a simpler society than ours today, and that from this fact may have grown the myth of the "curing" hopes of the early pioneers. However, translated to modern conditions, the pioneers appeared to have aspired to not much more than to what our best classes for the severely retarded aspire and frequently accomplish. The pioneers did not so much speak of making normals of "idiots," as of "educating the idiot."