Thursday, January 22, 2009

Dyslexia

A Labour MP (Graham Stringer) has claimed dyslexia is a myth invented by education chiefs to cover up poor teaching. I don't for one minute believe that he is 100% right. Only 99%. There are, undeniably, children who are dyslexic. Equally undeniably (except that it is always denied) there are children who are poor readers who get the "I'm dyslexic" badge and milk the system for all it's worth. Stringer claims that our "dyslexia industry" has been set up to ameliorate the deficiencies within the education system. It is interesting that the incidence of dyslexia fluctuates so wildly from nation to nation and language to language. One might imagine that those languages that use the common Roman alphabet that you are reading here (e.g. German, French, English, Italian...) might have similar dyslexic populations (by percentage). They don't. One might assume that nations speaking the same language might have a similar dyslexia rates. They don't. Clearly, Stringer has a point. If we are (and we are) producing many more dyslexics than same-language or similar-language nations, we are doing something wrong.

1 comment:

GC said...

Are we producing dyslexics or diagnosing them more efficiently than other countries? I don't imagine that in the countries you mention this sort of thing is celebrated or encouraged to be acceptable.

I think he's 50% correct (and therefore) 50% incorrect. Some people use this as an excuse for not being academically gifted. However, some people aren't.

But I have suspected, for many years, that both my mother and brother are, in fact, undiagnosed dyslexics.

Although my full respect goes to the MP for actually having an opinion.