Dyslexia and School

The Role of Parents

Links

Dyslexia

Teachers think that they are acting in the best interest of a child when they diagnose them as being dyslexic. It opens the door to giving a child all sorts of special help which may allow them to almost keep up with the rest of the class.

Another way of looking at dyslexia is, however, to say that schools create the problem and that if a child does not go to school, they need not suffer from it at all.  

Dyslexia and School

The school system is based on the assumption that all children should fit into the programme of education devised by the people running the schools.

Looked at dispassionately there is no reason to suppose that this assumption is correct - dyslexic children are an example of a group of children who cannot fit into the learning programme worked out by teachers.

There are two ways in which teachers could react to this: the first is to blame themselves for teaching the wrong stuff and the second is to blame the child. Unfortunately, and rather perversely, they choose the latter option.

For the child concerned, things can only get worse from this point.

Up until very recently, children who did not learn to read and write at the same time as everyone else were simply told that they were stupid. They were were made to feel second-rate in a hundred different ways and most of them soon came to accept that they could expect nothing positive from their time at school.

Nowadays, this is no longer considered to be acceptable. Many people who were mistreated in this way at school have gone on to achieve success in later life and it is not tenable to say that children who cannot learn to read at the same time as the rest of the class should be put on an educational scrap heap.

This does not mean that schools have taken the opportunity to realise that it is not up to them to tell a child when they must learn to read. Instead, it has been decided that the reason why some children are not able to conform must be because they have a medical condition - dyslexia.

If we were not all so intimidated by the mumbo-jumbo talked by the medical profession, we would see through this immediately. No one knows how or why children do learn to read and therefore how can anyone understand why they do not? 

In practice, this new quasi-medical approach is worse for the children concerned than the old neglectful approach. Having the combined weight of the teaching and medical professions imposed upon them, would confuse anyone. An innocent five-year-old has not got a chance.

Throughout all of this, it never occurs to the people running schools that they should perhaps just allow children to learn at their own pace. When this is done - in home schooling families, in many Steiner schools and in countless situations around the world where teachers and children work together in a sensible way - problems such as dyslexia do not arise.

The Role of Parents
Schools play on parents' fears that their children will not be able to look after themselves if they are unable to read and write. While this is true, it is concentrating on one small part of the picture and losing sight of the whole. 

It is important that children get as much as possible out of their years of education. If a child is diagnosed as being dyslexic and then given special reading lessons, this one issue starts to dominate their whole childhood. Their inability to read becomes the defining thing about them and they neglect or undervalue other activities which may be of more practical use and for which they may have a natural affinity. 

These other activities may include art, technical skills, mechanical skills, music, cooking, gardening, mathematics  etc. - things that are useful and rewarding in themselves and which also offer real career opportunities.

No one would consider that it was worth sacrificing all these things in order to gain a second-rate ability to read, but in practice this is what happens to many children. The tragedy is that children not given extra reading lessons (and not put bottom of the class) will, in due course, learn to read at least as well as those that are. They will do so in their own time and will never view reading as a particularly difficult or inaccessible activity.

Reading is an incredibly important skill in the modern world. This does not mean that children should be forced to acquire this skill at the time of a teacher's choosing. It means that parents should be sensitive to the individual development of their own child and should assure that the child receives appropriate help at the right time to acquire that skill.

In practical terms this means that if your child is not one of those who wants to read when they are five or six years old, you should pull them out of the school system before or as soon as they are diagnosed as being dyslexic. This will avoid them being given 'special help' from which they will need the rest of their lives to recover.

My Personal Perspective
I know that the views expressed in this article may be distressing to some parents  but I believe that this is an argument that needs to be made.

I have myself known young people who have been diagnosed as being dyslexic, sent to boarding schools, given three or four hours per day of special reading lessons and made to sit exams (with the aid of computers and someone to read the questions to them etc.) - but who have still left school hardly able to spell their own name out aloud or  to write down a phone number i.e. they went through all that trauma for nothing.

I have also known children who have shown all the classic signs of dyslexia at age five, six, seven, eight and nine but whose parents did not try to make them read and write. All these children learnt to read eventually, none of them view reading as a problem and I believe that they are all stronger individuals for having been allowed to develop other, none academic, skills and interests during their formative years.

Finally, one of my own children did not learn to read until they were eleven years old. I dread to think what they would have had to endure at school had we not been home-educating. 

Top of Page