(SUMMARY: Is dyslexia an in-born mental condition? Or merely an excuse that schools use to hide their instructional failures?)

SUMMARY: Is dyslexia an in-born mental condition? Or merely an excuse that schools use to hide their instructional failures?

jpg, dyslexia?

Some experts say “dyslexia” does not exist. It’s a figment. Meanwhile, “dyslexia” organizations stridently claim that 20% of all children have “dyslexia.” Maybe even 25%.

Here is a very odd chasm, indeed. On the one hand, not real. On the other hand, an epidemic even now destroying millions of kids.

Another intriguing thing about “dyslexia” is that people who think they have it do not like being told they don’t. Try to think of another disease or disorder where the victims, told they are not victims, will insist they are. Cancer or herpes? People are overjoyed to find they don’t have it. But with “dyslexia,” its alleged victims insist emphatically that, yes, they have it and don’t you dare say otherwise.

Already we sense the outlines of something bizarre and twilight-zonish.

Significantly, “dyslexia” is almost impossible to define. It’s not one thing, like a tumor. It’s more a semantic blur, like “UFO phenomena.” Turns out, “dyslexia” is just a fancy Greek word for not-reading. Much like “dysfunctional” means not-functioning–who knows why? Millions of children who aren’t good at reading are labeled “dyslexic,” as if that’s a conclusion. Not so. We still have no idea what is actually wrong, and neither do the people who so promiscuously abuse this term.

Suppose a boy walks in shivering, An expert says: He is “dys-caloric.” Which tells us what? That he was playing in the snow? That he had a terrifying dream? Or that he has a fever? We need to know, because cause is everything. Cause tells us what sort of shivering we are witnessing.

With regard to reading, we need to know why a child is having trouble. Is the failure in the student’s head; or is the failure in the school’s methods? Simply putting a fancy name on a problem, as if that’s the end-point, is dishonest and unhelpful. Indeed, “dyslexia” organizations and school officials would like the word “dyslexia” to be the termination of all thought and discussion. “Your kid is dyslexic–that’s it, nothing more to think about.” Which is disingenuous. There’s everything to think about. Let’s start.

The word “dyslexia” is wonderfully soft, vague, and medical-sounding. That seems to be its main appeal and why it can bamboozle parents into silence. It gives children an odd distinction they can call their own. It reveals nothing, and blinds all.

Note that 60 years ago the word was hardly used. Children with reading problems were said to suffer from hundreds of different problems. You would probably be surprised to find that many dozens of books were written to explain the myriad of factors said to cause poor reading: bad eyesight, weak hearing, chaotic family life, psychological problems, bad teeth, low IQ, depression, guilt, neuroses, bad parents, endocrine problems, bad nutrition, brain damage, difficult siblings, word-blindness, tonsils, adenoids–anything that could possibly be a problem for a child has, in fact, been offered as a cause for poor reading. Experts often recommended surgeries or weird contraptions intended to alter, for example, eye movements. You can’t fully appreciate the craziness in American education until you look at what the professors came up with 60 years ago in research on reading. Here’s one expert’s opinion quoted in “Why Pupils Fail In Reading” by Professor Helen Robinson (1946): “‘To put the matter in a nutshell, it appears that in order to avoid difficulties in reading and writing one should be left-eyed and left-handed, or right-eyed and right-handed, and preferably the latter.'” The book goes on in that mode for 249 pages.

Long story short, the Education Establishment has now conflated all these alleged causes, which tended to be specific and thus testable and disprovable, under the one word “dyslexia,” which tends to be vague and not disprovable. How convenient.

It’s clear that the Education Establishment, for 70 years, has been doing a lousy job at teaching children to read and was always shamelessly eager to grab at phony, pseudo-scientific explanations for their failures. Likewise, they were always in a great hurry to blame the victims. Not a pattern, all in all, that inspires confidence.

Remarkably, even though our self-proclaimed experts would consider a dozen new theories before breakfast as to why children could not read, they were all agreed that no one should consider an alternative method of instruction. Isn’t that the first thing a sincere and objective educator would consider?

Finally, the main question is always: why can’t a kid read? Is there something wrong with the child’s brain. That’s what the International Dyslexia Association claims. Or is it simply that schools insist on using improper methods to teach reading? As a Mount Everest of evidence suggests.

How should reading be taught–that is the essence of the debate, the essence of the so-called Reading Wars. Should we teach English as if it’s a phonetic language, which it is? Or should we pretend that English words are visual symbols, or shapes, that children must memorize–this being the central claim of Whole Word?

Now, it’s a matter of record: the experts pushing Whole Word concede that children can memorize only 100-200 sight-words per year. So even if everything is on track, the children know only 1,000 words as they reach middle school, and are thus less than semi-literate at the age of 12. So Whole Word, by its own claims, is a GUARANTEE of low literacy. Worse, many children cannot retain even 100 sight-words a year with automaticity, i.e. instant recall. So Whole Word all too often becomes a blueprint for almost no literacy. Why would any sane person endorse what amounts to planned illiteracy?

But it’s even worse than that. As children struggle to memorize new sight-words, their sight-vocabulary becomes increasingly jumbled. New material drives out old material. Fragments of words swim in their memories. The brain becomes confused about how to process print, and reacts in weird, unpleasant ways. Words may appear to slide on the page. Every excursion into print is like walking in a fun house. The frightening kind. Students become discouraged early; and many give up. At this point, the kids are labeled “dyslexic,” as if this condition were always there and the school just now discovered it!

Imagine that each week you’re introduced to 10 new people; and you’re expected to remember their names. Now you’re in the second grade and you’re expected to know instantly the names of 200 people, let’s say. By the fourth or fifth grade, you’re expected to know the names of 500 people. Think back to when you attended a really big meeting or convention. Recall how difficult it was to name every face with certainty. Recall also the tension, the fear, at being constantly put on the spot by each new person. Now we come to an interesting question: when you cannot recall all those names instantly, are you suffering from “dyslexia”???

Is it fair to pin a label on you when you are unable to do things that virtually nobody can do? Really, don’t you instead deserve the label “perfectly normal human”? Arguably, most “dyslexics” deserve exactly that title.

The majority of people would have great difficulty naming instantly as many as 1,000 faces, cars, paintings, etc. But 1,000, when it comes to reading, is a very small vocabulary. We need 25,000 minimum. Now you see the magnitude of the project, the hopelessness of the quest, the idiocy of the Whole Word approach, and how all the ordinary kids in the second, third and fourth grade will simply be destroyed.

Now, to put all this in perspective, let’s consider how quickly real reading instruction unfolds. Marva Collins, one of our great educators, ran a school in the Chicago ghetto, as it was then called. For more than 30 years she took the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged. She claims that she taught “all’ of them to read by Christmas of their first year, no matter whether they were 4, 5, 6 or 7 years old. So where’s the “dyslexia”?

Meanwhile, Siegfried Engelmann, author of “How To Teach A Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons,” claims that his instructors taught thousands of children to read, even children with IQs below 80. All became readers by the end of first grade. Where’s the “dyslexia”?

Note that at the age of three nearly all children learn a much more difficult skill than reading: they learn to speak a language. Any genuine deficiencies would be found at that time. Children showing up at school are rarely defective. So it should be no surprise that “all,” according to these experts, can learn to read if properly taught.

So here is the broad view of the situation: on the one side, children routinely learning to read comfortably and confidently by the age of seven; and on the other side, children who even at the age of 12 or 14 can’t actually read and may have already peaked. A stark and ugly contrast.

Here we come again to the big riddle: the Education Establishment’s refusal to drop a clearly flawed method. They insisted upon the latitude to create failure in every direction. But they didn’t want their methods blamed. What to do? Blame the children, of course. The children are said to be flawed; they are genetically messed up. Even the best intentioned teachers cannot hope to turn these second-tier children into readers. It’s only appropriate that these kids be considered handicapped and labeled “dyslexic.” In applying that label, the Education Establishment creates what they think is an ironclad alibi. Failure is not their fault; it’s the fault of these defective children.

Bottom line: Whole Word is the crime. “Dyslexia” is probably best understood as the cover-up.

All of the above illuminates why the USA is said to have 50 million functional illiterates and more than one million “dyslexics.”

One of the things that makes recovery difficult is that many people, once they’ve identified themselves as “dyslexics,” embrace the label with a vengeance. Told that they don’t, in fact, have a problem, they say: yes I do. They don’t seek help, defiantly assuming they can’t be helped. After all, they’ve been told by “literacy experts” that they were born this way. That’s the power of this evil myth.

The Education Establishment has made the whole subject of reading so confused that parents have almost no chance of understanding what is being done; the media explain nothing; and the schools dissemble. But here’s one way to boil it all down: if a child is having any trouble learning to read, ask this question first: is this child made to memorize sight-words? If so, that’s very likely the problem.

Reading difficulties, so far as I can tell, become conceptually interesting only when you have a child who was never taught any sight-words, at any stage, and went on to have trouble. This almost never happens, according to Marva Collins, etc. But at least we could say, legitimately for a change, maybe this child has something that can be called “dyslexia.”

The safest assumption when a child has trouble reading is that schools are not teaching it properly. They need to emphasize the alphabet and the sounds. It’s so fundamental. If a child understands the concept that symbols on the page stand for sounds, and the child is processing words from left to right, one syllable at a time, the child will learn to read. But Whole Word, for most of its vicious history, told children the alphabet was irrelevant, and that no one should bother with letters, syllables, or sounds.

The leading spokesperson for Whole Word declared flatly: “Readers do not need the alphabet.”

(For more analysis of the reading crisis, see “42: Reading Resources” on the writer’s site Improve-Education.org. Also see “33: How To Help A Non-Reader To Read.”

A short 4-minute graphic video sums up many of these points: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeFLLnRWROQ )

Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see \”42: Reading Resources.\” Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.\”

Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of http://www.Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site. One focus is problems in the schools; see \”56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.\” Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA.\”

Author Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see \”42: Reading Resources.\” Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.\”

Category: Advice
Keywords: dyslexia, functional illiteracy, phonics, alphabet, disability, cognitive, sight-words, whole