What 'Mental Retardation' Means, and Why the Term Is Acceptable

· In the field, some professionals instead use the term cognitive disability. So you get reports referring to individuals with a mild cognitive disability, a moderate cognitive disability or severe/profound cognitive disability.

I don't find the term "children with mental retardation" offensive. The "R" word (retard), however, is every bit as offensive to me as the "N" word, and it saddens me that school officials do not treat disability harassment with the same seriousness that they do racial harassment.

Lyda Astrove

Rockville

Thank you for your corrections and your nuanced explanations of the array of terminology. I have often confessed how little I know about special education, and how infrequently I write about it, mostly because it is so complicated and so difficult, at least for me, to turn into stories that readers will find interesting and comprehensible.

The nomenclature is changing. You seem to want to push it in the same direction I do. That awful use of the word "retard" is likely to bring an end soon to the term "mental retardation" in programs. The President's Committee on Mental Retardation has changed its name to the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, and the former Association for Retarded Citizens now calls itself the Arc.

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