Carmen and John, Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Regarding the work of Marc Gold, sadly most of his original work is out of print. On the upside, the methods he pioneered are absorbed into the most common methods and assumptions driving the training of people with mental retardation. Gold called his method "Try Another Way" meaning that it was the responsiblity of the educator to have the necessary flexibility to help other learn. Gold felt that a student's inability to learn was more a reflection of the teacher's methods than the student's ability. I found a good description of his work at the Autism National Committe website (http://www.autcom.org/iq3.html) in an stricle entitled "The IQ Fallacy" which contains the following quote: Addressing the parents of supposedly incapable individuals with autism, Gold blasted the test-and-label agenda: "I would imagine that those individuals ...who came to me with the label 'autism,' and who allegedly had many of the characteristics that were regarded as being 'autistic,' needed careful and objective re- evaluation. We who work with the handicapped have a continuing responsibility not to accept labels, and not to accept characteristics that are 'hanging tools' that we can use to make sure that the individual stays functioning at the same level...why don't we believe that (people with autism) all have receptive language, and stop telling them, even in an indirect way, all the ways we expect them to behave; stop discussing all the things they do that you or I consider to be 'autistic'.... I think that diagnosis is useless, and that prediction or prognosis is fatal." This sounds exactly like what the proponents of school inclusion, facilitated communication, and supported employment are saying in the 1990s: Gold, a prophet in the wilderness, offered this devastating critique in 1973.