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"In the society of intellectuals the educable child is entirely out of place. He cannot meet the demand for middle school or university where even at the lower school he already has his difficulties. Desperate parents seek their help in private lessons or if possible in schools for educable children. But at the sight of trainable children, who are sometimes admitted too in these schools, these parents get deterred."

"The trainable child in general is only 'taken care of.' This might be done in 'joint' families, but with progressing acculturation and better medical care (formerly they died very young) the trainable child presents its problem. The child is mostly hidden. The parents are twisted by the conflict of guilt and shame just as is the case in other countries. Another factor is that the chances for a good marriage for the daughter are minimized by the presence of a retarded brother or sister."

"In intellectual circles in Indonesia too the question is raised: 'Who will take care after our child when we are no more?' Social and cultural development exclude brothers and sisters for this purpose. There are parents who accept their retarded child as he is. They integrate him in the family and make efforts to send him to a special school. Also in them lives the complex of disgrace, guilt and shame, but they are able to open themselves for advice and guidance."

"The condition of the retarded child of the economically deprived in big cities is worse than that with the peasantry: lack of fresh air and mostly hidden."

"The pioneers for the care of the mentally subnormal are Indonesians and Chinese. Their religion is: Mohammedan, Protestant, Catholic. The greatest part of these humanists are ex-pupils of the pre-war Christian schools. They give their energy and make their efforts to break the barriers by introducing the retarded children to the society as human beings who have their full right and place under the sun."

"Indeed, care for the handicapped in Indonesia now is in the air."

Similar material is on hand from such countries as India, Thailand, Nigeria and from numerous Latin American republics. However, the two brief accounts from Kenya and Indonesia should suffice to indicate that social scientists interested in cross-cultural exploration of the impact of mental retardation under still existing primitive societal circumstances in this era of steady movement towards industrialization and urbanization can now enlist the aid and resources of public and private organizations as these are taking the first steps toward provision of services. However, as in so many other fields, progress is swift and these opportunities for study will diminish.

Before going on to a comparative discussion of some of the more specific phenomena, I would like to call attention to a very interesting development in which economic factors related to labor supply have produced in highly developed countries circumstances which have resulted in an avoidable increase of mental retardation. The reference here is to the importation by highly industrialized Central European countries of large numbers of unskilled laborers from Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. A study from Switzerland (6) points out e.g. that by the sixth school year the children of Spanish workers in Switzerland have more than twice the rate of retardation than Swiss children. What are the contributing circumstances? Typically these workers are housed in wooden barracks erected at the fringe of cities. The mothers, who would not work in Spain, do work in Geneva. Both parents are poorly educated; the mothers, in particular, speak little French, and this language difficulty accentuates their social isolation which is intensified by the fact that it is the father who does the shopping for the family. Neither parent gets to know the social and cultural resources of the community. Stringent Swiss regulations (reflecting narrow economy-mindedness and lacking social responsibility) forbid the entry of the family's dependents into Switzerland until the parents have worked there for three years. This, of course, results in added serious disadvantage to the children's development. While the mother works, the children, once permitted to come to Switzerland, are taken care of by the grandmother who typically speaks only Spanish. The seriousness of the problem can be judged from the fact that in some public schools in Switzerland more than one third of the children in the early elementary grades do not speak the language in which they are taught.

In Germany, where similar conditions prevail as a result of large-scale importation of foreign workers, such children in at least one city are getting special lessons twice weekly from teachers of their own homeland, employed by the school authorities in order to counteract to some extent this cultural isolation and the resulting inferior intellectual performance. (7)