‘The first thing I said to Mum was, “Oh, so I am still alive then?” I could see Mum was crying, but that did not change how I felt.’
WHAT EXACTLY ARE LEARNING DIFFICULTIES?
NEGATIVE ATTITUDES TOWARDS LEARNING DIFFICULTIES
Amongst the ill informed, there has always been this long-running view that problems such as dyslexia and ADHD are not real conditions. Going back to the seventies and eighties, a lot of people thought they were nothing more than excuses given by middle-class parents, who wanted their children to be high achievers.
Even today, these attitudes still manifest themselves. In November 2005, an hour-long Dispatches documentary entitled Dyslexia the Myth went out on Channel 4 in the UK. This programme attacked everybody in the learning difficulties world. It attacked teachers for using the wrong teaching methods; it attacked the Dyslexia Institute for using the wrong programmes; unbelievably, it attacked the Dore Achievement Centre saying that we had ‘no research’; it attacked parents for not communicating enough with their children.
As you can imagine, it just incensed everyone. Every parent and every teacher knows that children with learning difficulties are suffering from something very, very real. The fact that some so-called experts still refuse to acknowledge that learning difficulties have any scientific basis is scary.
I am amazed how little some people have actually thought through the problem. The fact is learning difficulties like dyslexia are real conditions. If you teach a child something and they have already forgotten it the next day, are they being difficult? Do they choose to forget what they have already learned? Of course not! It is a tragic condition and it is astounding how little understanding exists about what these children and adults have to put up with. No one chooses to be forgetful, no one chooses to be disorganised, no one chooses to find reading difficult, and no one chooses to find concentration difficult. These things are beyond their control and it is very cruel to think of them as stupid, lazy or thick.
We now know that many children with issues like Susie’s are actually extremely bright. It is the level of a person’s creativity that gives us a clue about their underlying intelligence. Hence, there are many famous businessmen, scientists and artists who have enormous creativity and intelligence, but struggle with the basics such as reading and writing. Indeed, you might be surprised at the number of people rumoured to have ADHD or dyslexia.
Many high-profile people are reported to suffer, or have suffered. Amongst them are Richard Branson, John Lennon, Tom Cruise, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, David Bailey, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Alva Edison and Albert Einstein. But for every one of these high-profile folk there are a million more with similar symptoms that do not fulfil their potential. In fact, it is clear that they frequently suffer from the depressive tendencies that so often manifest themselves alongside learning issues – and, when this is the case, it affects them seriously and detracts from their quality of life despite their outward success. If we are ever going to move forward on this issue, it is vitally important that people understand the problem. Only when this happens can we start to develop a very different society.
PROBLEMATIC DEFINITIONS
There is no doubt that learning, attention and behavioural difficulties have been around for an awful long time. The problem has been that the labelling of the issue has been dreadfully unreliable. Some children have tended to be diagnosed according to the focus and skill sets of the professional providing the diagnosis. If that professional is more tuned to the concept of ADHD, as they are in America, then the child will often receive that label. In the UK, the same children could be more likely to be labelled as having dyslexia.
We now know that the overlap between ADHD, dyslexia and other learning or behavioural difficulties like dyspraxia and Asperger’s Syndrome is huge and, in fact, they are all part of one spectrum. Thus, the whole subject of labelling needs a complete rethink for two reasons: first, labelling is unreliable and, second, we have come to regard labels like ‘dyslexia’ and ‘ADHD’ as having negative connotations. In fact, these conditions usually, but not always, hide a bright person whose intellect is waiting to be released.
As is always the case, when things get a bit medical I seek help from Dr Roy Rutherford, the Medical Director for Dore Achievement Centres, to explain them. So, for most of the following section, he must take credit.
WHAT IS DYSLEXIA?
Dyslexia literally means ‘difficulty with reading’. It was originally used to describe the problems seen in neurological patients who had damage to the language areas of the thinking brain. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, many medical specialists believed that developmental dyslexia in children who developed reading difficulties without any evidence of brain damage was a functional problem within the very same area of the brain. Only recently, with the advent of brain scans, has doubt been cast on this theory.
In 1968, the World Federation of Neurologists (WFN) defined dyslexia as ‘a disorder in children who, despite conventional classroom experience, fail to attain the language skills of reading, writing and spelling commensurate with their intellectual abilities’.
In the eighties, the only definition of dyslexia was an exclusionary one. If a child’s difficulty with reading could not be explained by low intelligence, poor eyesight, bad hearing, inadequate educational opportunities or any other problem, then it was determined by exclusion that the child must be dyslexic. A more specific definition was needed rather than one based on exclusion.
The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) defines dyslexia as a neurologically based, often familial, disorder that interferes with the acquisition and processing of language. Varying in degrees of severity, it is manifested by difficulties in receptive and expressive language, including reading, writing, spelling, handwriting, and sometimes in arithmetic. Dyslexia is not the result of lack of motivation, sensory impairment, inadequate instructional or environmental opportunities, or other limiting conditions, but may occur together with these conditions.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) in the USA defines dyslexia as a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin. It is characterised by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition, and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. The NIH has spent many years researching learning disabilities. They have found that:
Dyslexia affects at least one out of every five children (20 per cent)
Dyslexia affects approximately the same number of boys as it does girls
Dyslexia is the leading cause of reading failure and school dropouts in the USA
Reading failure is the most commonly shared characteristic of juvenile offenders
Unless helped, children do not outgrow reading failure or dyslexia.
Key features of someone with dyslexia
He (or she):
Often has average or above-average IQ, but doesn’t do as well on school tests as they should
Feels ‘dumb’, has poor self-esteem and lacks confidence
Becomes easily frustrated and emotional about school, reading or testing, and often uses avoidance tactics to get out of doing these things
Seems to ‘zone out’ or daydream often, gets lost easily or loses track of time (attention deficit)
Reads