Four young scholars, Shimizu, Terada, Fujishima, and Tanaka, attended as proposers to this symposium. They proposed and discussed under their psychological and/or educational point of view about education for mentally retarded children that were intended to improve their development.
Shimizu insisted as follows. In spite of the necessity of early diagnosis and early education for mentally defective children, skills and methods of diagnosis are incomplete, and the organizations for diagnosis and counselling are insufficient. It's very difficult to maintain a contact relationship among diagnosis, remedy, and education. So, mentally retarded children couldn't fully develop their ability. These conditions especially have negative effects on the before four-year old feeble minded. Counselling, remedy, and infantile education organizations must cooperate to overcome such conditions.
Terada pointed out as follows. Phases in cognitive development that Piaget, J. A. and Bruner, J. S. insisted on are also seen in mentally retarded children, but the inner structures of these phases are incomparable with those in normal children. Moreover, retardation of cognitive functions in mentally defective children is attributed to lack of their spontaneities of adoptingouter stimuli(experience)positively. Themanyelements in real life are essential to their development, but do not reconstruct the cognitive function itself, Systematic learning that contain iconic, symbolic, and conceptional stages must be done in touch with the developmental stages of the children to facilitate its reconstruction.
Fujishima insisted as follows. Educational contents for mentally retarded children must be reciprocal. Mentally retarded children are interested in the events concerning everyday life, and acquire new behavior systems through learnings in everyday life. Thinking it the best learning system, he recommends what is called “the bazaar unit learning”, a kind of learning through work, which integrates elements of life under the exhibition of children's works.
Tanaka brought forward four problems about the real situations surrounding mentally retarded children.
(1) A number of children refused to school is increasing, though classes and schoos for mentally retarded children are increasing.
(2) Individual differences between the beginning salaries for the graduates are getting larger as an enterprise gets large.
(3) The purpose of education is changed to build up a part-individual, and to cultivate easy usable workers in the society.
(4) les necessary to grasp the cognitive development in mental defective children in relation to the group to which they belong. On the basis of his practice at Omi Gakuen, he insisted that he could improve the cognitive activities of mentally retarded children byplacing them systematically in three groups, that is, a life group, a learning group, and a working group.
Next we had a discussion on the basis of the propositions as abovementioned. The conclusion of it is as fallaws. There is no sense in discussing whether the learning by unit of experience or the learning by systematized subject matters is more effective, because the contents of both learnings aren't defined clearly. It's a matter of course to begin the education for mentally defective children with empirical and concrete materials in life. And it's necessary to systematize the logical knowledges in such materials and to reconstruct them in active, working, and grouping forms. Mentally retarded children should not be considered that they have no ability. The ability can be improved by devising learning materials and teaching method, and by giving them a variety of children's group.Treatment, counselling, and educational organizations which guarantee the possibility of development in mentally retarded children must be closely connected with each other and must be enriched institutionally.