The 26 October 2016 Wall Street Journal article ‘Babies show a clear bias–to learn new things’ describes contemporary research that reinforces the emphasis in Social Role Valorization (SRV) on imitation, role modeling, competency enhancement and the developmental model. “Babies leap at the chance to learn something new.” This echoes the opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “all human beings by nature desire to know.” If we want people–no matter how impaired or societally devalued–to learn and become more competent, then it is important to believe that they can learn and hold high expectations for their ability to learn, among other things.
Another point from the article relevant to SRV has to do with interpersonal identification and imitation. The author notes that babies “can figure out who is likely to teach them.” Babies are already figuring out their environment enough to know who they can learn from, and accordingly pay greater attention to those people. This ability does not stop with babies of course. SRV proposes that we can facilitate interpersonal identification with the goal of fostering imitation, competency enhancement and learning (Wolfensberger, SRV monograph, 3rd rev. ed., pp. 118-121).