Abstract
The education of the profoundly and multiply handicapped children has offered, more and more, many and difficult tasks to solve in this country. If we adapt the usual principle of 'school education' to their education, we can't find the solution to it. Schools for the idiot in the U.S. were established for considerably profoundly handicapped children about the middle of the nineteenth century, and gradually turned from their early educational school to custodial asylum. This process of establishment and development of these schools is very interesting. In this paper as the first step, the process of introducing education of the idiot in the U. S. before 1845 is disscussed to reexamine common opinion on the process of establishment of school for the idiot. Here, the following results are confirmed. 1) The remark that insanity is curable disease separated the idiot, incurablepatient, from the insane, who were both poor or pauper. 2) Clinical observation in the hospital for the insane differentiated the idiot of his own from the insane. 3) Therefore the idiot was dismissed from the hospital to aim at cure of the insane. 4) Instituions for the deaf and dumb, and the blind tried to educate some mild idiots to some degree, but they were dismissed from these institutions, for they were never considered as subject to care of themselves. So that educaion for them might not introduce the school for the idiot. 5) Information on education of the idiot from Europe attracted powerfully many physicians of the hospital for the insane, who had elements to react to the information. 6) In this period, image of the idiot and education of him was most obscure.
