Dyslexia is a label that is commonly applied to children who
seem perfectly normal, except that they have not learned to read in school. Yet
the word dyslexia was not originally intended for that purpose. It was
originally used in cases in which adults had lost their ability to read as a
result of a brain injury, such as from a stroke or from a blow to the head. This
loss of reading ability generally went along with other signs of brain damage,
including other problems with language. If a child who otherwise seems perfectly
normal is not learning to read in school, we should be cautious about using
medical terms like dyslexia, which imply that the problem is in the child, and
specifically in the child's brain and nervous system, rather than in the
school.
Today, the diagnosis of dyslexia is given to many children
whose only apparent problem is that they are failing to learn to read in
school. Thus, dyslexia is one of a range of problems that are being classified
as learning disabilities. Unfortunately, when we apply a label such as
"dyslexic" or "learning disabled" to a child simply because the child is not
doing well in school, we are jumping to the conclusion that the problem is in
the child's nervous system. Thus, problems in the school, such as poor teaching methods, may go unrecognized and unsolved. We should be much more
cautious about using the "d" word--disability--when we are really talking about a
simple lack of skill, as opposed to a lack of ability to develop a skill. There
can be many reasons why someone has not acquired a particular skill. Sometimes,
the reason is medical. Sometimes, it isn't. Those were lessons that I learned
in childhood.
When I was a preschooler, there was a little boy in our
neighborhood could not talk and did not seem to understand anything that was
said to him. Even though he was over 2 years old, he did not know any words at
all, not even mama or dada. Some people suspected that he was mentally slow.
Fortunately, a doctor eventually figured out the real cause of the problem. The
boy was completely deaf. In fact, the doctor said that the child had been born
deaf. The child had been deaf all along, and nobody realized it. The boy could
not talk because he could not hear. He could not respond to or imitate speech
sounds because he had simply never heard them. Once somebody finally realized that
the boy could not hear, he was enrolled in a special school where he could
learn to use sign language and read lips and even speak English, along with
learning the regular school subjects. The inability to hear is a disability. So
is the inability to see. Children who have disabilities of that kind certainly need
special schooling. When they grow up, they will also be entitled to reasonable
accommodations in the workplace, according to the Americans with Disabilities
Act.
A girl in our neighborhood had a different kind of problem. She
could see and hear and talk just fine. She seemed to be of normal intelligence.
Unfortunately, she wasn't learning to read in school, and it was making her
life miserable. Because of her problem with reading, she was doing poorly in
all of her classes except art class. All of her other teachers assumed that she
was simply lazy and bad. So they punished and humiliated her for failing to
learn. Her teachers failed to teach her to read, but they did succeed in
turning a happy preschooler into a young woman with serious emotional problems.
Fortunately, the girl's problem with reading eventually got
solved, not by the school system but through sheer dumb luck. The summer after
she finished sixth grade, she started babysitting. One of her charges was a
girl who had gone through second grade without having learned to read. This
younger child was getting tutored in phonics, and the babysitter was asked to
help her with her phonics homework. Thus, the babysitter ended up learning
phonics from the younger child. As a result, the babysitter quickly caught up
to her own grade level in reading.
The babysitter explained to me that nobody had ever shown
her how to sound out words letter by letter. For years, she had been trying
(and failing) to memorize whole English words as random sequences of letters, without
an understanding that letters systematically represent sounds. She never
learned phonics because our school used a whole-word teaching method, which was
built into our reading textbooks. Those books were called the Reading for
Meaning series. The advocates of the whole-word method claim that their method teaches
children to read for meaning, while phonics supposedly only teaches children
sounds. Yet how can a child figure out what a text means if the child cannot
figure out what the printed words actually say? Several years of whole-word
instruction had left that girl functionally illiterate. A few lessons in
phonics allowed her to catch up to grade level.
The whole-word method of teaching reading was invented by
Thomas Gallaudet in Massachusetts in the 1830s, for the purpose of teaching
deaf children to read. He reasoned that deaf children could not learn phonics
because they cannot hear speech sounds. In the 1840s, Massachusetts' first
Secretary of Education, Horace Mann, decided that Gallaudet's method should be
used for teaching hearing children as well. The results were disastrous, and
the teachers rebelled. Yet Mann had the last word because he got to hand-pick
the people who went on to teach in the teachers' colleges. Thus, many aspiring teachers
from that day to this have been taught to use the whole-word method, even
though scientific studies have consistently shown it to be ineffective and
harmful. In the 1920s, Dr. Samuel Orton showed that the use of the whole-word
method was the cause of the reading problems that are now called dyslexia. The
more "sight words" children were asked to learn before they started learning
about phonics, the more likely they were to have problems with reading. Yet the
whole-word method remained firmly entrenched in many public schools in the
United States, even after Rudolf Flesch explained the problem in his 1955
bestseller Why Johnny Can't Read.
Lately, I have heard about more and more children who are
getting diagnoses of learning disabilities of one kind or another. Often, the
only evidence that anything is wrong is that the child is not doing well in
school. One young man who is currently in college told me that he had some sort
of "processing disorder." When he was in school, he had an individualized
educational program, or IEP, because of that presumed learning disability. As a
result, he was given many accommodations and special privileges in school. He
was allowed to take more time than the other children when taking tests, even
high-stakes tests like the SATs. On one hand, I'm glad that children who have
genuine disabilities, such as blindness or deafness or autism, can get special
help and special accommodations. On the other hand, I wonder whether there was
really anything wrong with that young man. Did he really have some sort of
learning disability, or was he just suffering from the ill effects of bad
teaching methods or poor discipline?
I'm glad that the young man was able to get through primary
and secondary school and into college, but I wonder whether the learning
disability label did him any good. Was there ever really anything wrong with
him? If not, would the false diagnosis of a learning disability have done more
harm than good? Did the label and the IEP allow the school to hide the fact
that it wasn't successful in teaching basic academic skills? After all, if the
boy had good academic skills, he would never have been labeled as learning
disabled. And what about the psychological effects of the diagnosis on the boy
himself? Might it be harmful for a person who is not truly disabled to have a
self-concept of being disabled? Might the diagnosis of a learning disability
have bred a sense of complacency, an acceptance that it was okay for him to
have poor skills in reading or arithmetic? Although the special attention and accommodations
he received as a result of his IEP allowed him to get better grades, not to
mention a higher SAT score, did they breed an unhealthy sense of entitlement?
Will he expect that the road will be made smooth for him for the rest of his
life, because of a "disability" that may not even exist? It's doubtful that any
workplace will make special accommodations for someone with a "processing
disorder," whatever that means.
In recent years, many people have expressed concern over the
increasing role that psychological and psychiatric diagnoses as well as psychiatric
medications have been playing in education. I share that concern. Psychiatry in
the United States went from an overemphasis on psychosocial explanations for neuropsychiatric
problems in the mid-20th century to an overemphasis on neuropsychiatric
explanations for psychosocial problems today. In the mid-20th
century, it was commonplace for psychiatrists to assume that disorders such as
autism or schizophrenia were a psychological reaction to bad mothering, rather
than being the result of a brain disorder. Today, we are seeing an increasing
tendency for nearly any behavioral or academic problem in childhood to be assumed
to be the result of a brain disorder. Thus, we are seeing an increasing number
of children who receive some sort of medical-sounding diagnosis, and an
increasing number of children who are receiving psychiatric medication.
To sort out truth from nonsense, we have to think clearly
about the difference between a disability and a mere lack of skill. The little
neighbor boy I described above could not speak or understand what was said to
him. Thus, he lacked important language skills. Eventually, it turned out that he
lacked these skills because he had a serious disability: congenital deafness. Clearly,
he needed some special schooling to help him compensate for that disability. Similarly,
the girls in my neighborhood who could not read lacked reading skills. However,
their problem was not due to some defect in their ability to learn. Their
problem was due to the use of a defective teaching method in their school. This
defective teaching method had no effect on me because I taught myself to read before
I started school. I figured out English phonics by analyzing the rhyming words
in my Dr. Seuss books. Likewise, those two girls also eventually learned to
read by learning phonics outside of school. Their "learning disability" was
solved; but sadly, the school's "teaching disability" persisted.
If an adult loses his or her ability to read because of a
stroke or a head injury, it makes sense to use a medical term like dyslexia to
describe the problem. However, if some child who otherwise seems perfectly
normal is failing to learn to read in school, the problem is probably in the
school, not in the child. The solution is to fix the school, not label the
child as disabled.
