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The third obstacle is perhaps the most pervasive, and, at the same time, the one least clearly recognized. The professional literature dealing with the efforts in recent years of integrating retarded persons into the community alleges time and again that there is a strong and pervasive resistance on the part of your neighbors and mine (the common people) to having such persons live among them. However, the actual experience in the United States and in other countries negates this assertion. Where mentally retarded individuals have an opportunity to live like the rest of us in the community, they have been met with acceptance, ever in places where initially there was resistance to their moving into the neighborhood. Once people actually encounter retarded persons, they are frequently not just tolerant but sympathetic and supportive, as has been so well documented by Robert Perske in this Symposium.

The prejudicial attitude does not rest with the common man, the man on the street, but rather with a small but vocal group of opinion makers, textbook writers, research workers, and administrators who, for some reasons that have yet to be explored and explained, feel impelled to denigrate and downgrade the potential as well as the actual achievements of persons with mental retardation. It is they who continue to talk about individuals incapable of responding to either education or rehabilitation, who stress disability rather than potential, who make their low expectations into self-fulfilling prophecies, who recommend policies that are exclusive rather than inclusive, denying access to programs because they presume the applicant to be incapable of sufficient progress.

Lest you feel that I am overstating the case, let me relate to you that in England recently a highly regarded psychiatric textbook was published with such grossly denigrating description of persons with mental retardation that a British advocacy group, the Campaign for the Mentally Handicapped, felt impelled to mount a protest action resulting in hundreds of signatures, resulting in turn in the publishers' promise that corrections would be made. In the United States, a group of well-known research workers in the field of psychology issued a statement claiming that in severe and profound retardation, limits of educability are encountered which preclude any program of training and education as futile (Partlow Review Committee, 1978). The National Association for Retarded Citizens recognized the seriousness of this situation and issued a strong Resolution in support of a developmental approach which is firmly based on the knowledge, not just the belief, that there is no human being who does not possess the capacity to grow and develop. The Center of Human Policy at Syracuse University responded to the psychologists' challenge with a manifesto entitled The Community Imperative which refuted point by point the psychologists' assertions (Center of Human Policy, 1979).

I have dwelt on this matter at such length because I hope that the discussions of this Symposium will address themselves very specifically to this issue and assist our member associations around the world to understand this problem and to develop appropriate action programs in much the same way that racial prejudice and the misinformation underlying it must be met head-on.

In our rapidly developing field it is urgent to spread new knowledge, to update textbooks, and to take positive steps to use this new knowledge effectively in day to day programs and services.

The 1968 Jerusalem Congress, at which the International League launched the Declaration of the Rights of the Mentally Retarded Persons, was followed by the League's 1972 Congress in Montreal with the challenging theme, "Suit the Action to the Word." What I am trying to convey to you is that this challenge is still confronting us; it is laid out carefully and well in the League's publication Step-by-Step, guidelines to implementing the Declaration on the Rights of Mentally Retarded Persons (ILSMH, 19?8b).

It may appear at first that these comments pertain only to countries with well established services for retarded children and adults, but this is not so. Observations of the international scene during the past twenty years have brought to light numerous instances where the so-called developing countries received in good faith and acted on information which no longer reflected acceptable practices. This Symposium must give careful consideration as to how the International League could strengthen and safeguard avenues of information that will help our member associations to assume effective leadership in their countries. Obviously, the League's collaborative arrangements with the United Nations and its Specialized Agencies, as well as with the international voluntary organizations concerned with disability, can provide a basis for extending and strengthening the channels of communication.

Within the framework of this brief introductory paper it is obviously not possible to deal adequately with what has remained, almost everywhere, the most difficult problem in planning for the adult persons with retardation -- namely, appropriate employment or meaningful occupation. I would like to single out a few highlights.