Society and Culture
In most developed countries, since the early 20th century many people with Down syndrome were housed in institutions or colonies and excluded from society. However, since the early 1960s parents and their organizations, educators and other professionals have generally advocated a policy of inclusion, bringing people with any form of mental or physical disability into general society as much as possible. Such organizations included the National Association for Down Syndrome, the first known organization advocating for Down syndrome individuals in the United States founded by Kathryn McGee in 1960; MENCAP advocating for all with mental disabilities, which was founded in the UK in 1946 by Judy Fryd; and the National Down Syndrome Congress, the first truly national organization in the U.S. advocating for Down syndrome families, founded in 1973 by Kathryn McGee and others.
Read more about this topic: Down Syndrome
Famous quotes containing the words society and/or culture:
“One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)