Originally Posted by Peter Hitchens
Does Dyslexia exist?
As I expected, by Sunday evening my e-mail inbox was throbbing with angry messages denouncing me for casting doubt on the existence of 'dyslexia' in my Mail on Sunday column. As I expected, almost all these messages were roughly the same, telling me how ignorant and horrible I am, urging me to do 'research', as if I hadn't done, and asserting as fact that the writer ( or the writer's child) suffered from 'dyslexia' and that it therefore existed. Do people really not grasp that this isn't proof? One mother rang me up and peremptorily demanded that I prove that 'dyslexia ' doesn't exist. All accused me of ignorance, some of personal cruelty.
Several, baselessly, accused me of mocking or otherwise criticising the children who have been classified as 'dyslexic'. Some correspondents severely and misleadingly misquoted Professor Julian Elliott, whose remarks in the Times Educational Supplement sparked off my article. I'll deal with that later.
It is amazing how you can mesmerize so many people into accepting that something is scientifically proven by conferring a pseudo-scientific name, packed with Greek or Latin expressions, on that something. Once it has such a name, its defenders tend to believe that there is no longer any need to explain or justify it. They demand that I somehow disprove its existence, when it is up to them to prove that it exists, since they are the ones who urge that highly-expensive and questionable public policy, diverting resources and attention from the real problem, should be based on the idea that it exists.
And yet, like its cousin 'ADHD', 'dyslexia' is a vague, subjective thing. There is no single agreed diagnosis, let alone an objective one. There are at least 28 different descriptions of it. Many of its supporters believe it involves such things as 'reversing' letters, which others say are not symptoms of it at all.
Above all, it is 'treated' by methods which would work equally well on anyone who couldn't read properly. Go, I beg and urge you, to the website of the British Dyslexia Association and study the list of supposed 'indications'. Well, I know of children who have displayed most of these, at one time or another, and have learned to read without any difficulty at all. I suspect I was one of them. The "I think I might be dyslexic" checklist for adults is also pretty alarming, if you believe in this stuff. Does the fact that I almost always type 'dyslexia' as 'dylsexia' mean I might be 'dyslexic'? Or does it just mean that I cannot type? Let us thank heaven nobody has devised a pill for 'dyslexia' .
Virtually none even began to deal with my counter-assertion, that 'dyslexia' has grown hugely as a problem since schools abandoned the systematic teaching of reading according to the method which is known to work ( and has been known to work for centuries) nowadays known as 'synthetic phonics. The curious decision of teachers to abandon this method in the middle of the 20th century was analysed more than 50 years ago in Rudolf Flesch's best-selling, powerful 1955 book 'Why Johnny Can't Read'.
Flesch's argument, for the immediate resumption of teaching by phonics, was largely ignored by the teaching profession in Britain and America until very recently - when undeniable research in Clackmannanshire made it impossible to ignore the truth. It showed that Synthetic Phonics (SP) was highly effective in teaching children to read.
But even then, many British schools( I am not sure of the current state of affairs in North America) continue to resist. Where they do use synthetic phonics, they often use it only as part of a 'mixture of methods', which simply confuses the children.
It is interesting, in that case, to note that advocates of the existence of 'Dyslexia' say quite openly that one of the (many) theories of 'Dyslexia', (and here I quote their own pseudo-scientific language from the largely pro-'Dyslexia' entry on Wikipedia) "stems from a deficit in phonological processing or difficulty in recognizing that spoken words are formed by discrete phonemes (for example, that the word CAT comes from the sounds [k], [æ], and [t]).
As a result, affected individuals have difficulty associating these sounds with the visual letters that make up written words. Key studies of the phonological deficit hypothesis include the finding that the strongest predictor of reading success in school-age children is phonological awareness, and that phonological awareness instruction can improve reading scores in children with reading difficulties."
Oddly enough, that is a pretty accurate description of precisely what SP does - breaking down the sounds in the language, and associating them with the letters that express them. To that extent - and to that extent only - I agree with the 'dyslexia' lobby. Some children will not learn to read unless they are taught using SP.
Others will mysteriously and miraculously learn to read however badly they are taught. There is therefore an argument that some children learn in different ways, which may betoken a physical difference. This explains why some children emerge from bad schools able to read, whereas their brothers and sisters may go to the same school and come out functionally illiterate. But if all were taught SP properly, all would learn to read. The teaching of SP certainly won't harm those who don't need it to learn how to connect letters with sounds.
However, this difference is not necessarily a disability, especially since teaching with SP puts it right. It is just a difference, a difference made much more important by a major failure of teaching in our schools, affecting a significant minority of children who are thereby stuck with a disadvantage for their whole school career, and possibly for life. You might suggest, therefore , that 'dyslexia' is the product of the bad teaching of a significant minority of children.
How would a sensible society deal with this? Many teachers and many parents know perfectly well, from experience, that there are some children, especially those who have been read to a lot at home, who pick up reading skills by a sort of magic, and don't need to learn systematically. These will survive even the most terrible reading teaching, the worst of which relies on children remembering the shapes of words, and is tested by getting them to 'read' passages they have effectively memorised.
But the large number who do need phonics teaching will fail and remain more or less illiterate, unless taught these "discrete phonemes" . Thanks to the 'literacy strategy' and the incessant tests and drilling for tests which result from it, many of these will be assessed as being able to read when they can't really, and passed on to their secondary schools to face years of misery, frustration and nightmare - classes in which they are assumed to be able to read well, but cannot. What is baffling is that, given the clear evidence in favour of SP, so many schools still don't use it exclusively. I suspect this is because many modern teachers regard it as 'old-fashioned' or 'authoritarian'. I also wonder, after so many years of bad schooling, if some teachers themselves have difficulty in reading, writing and spelling.
Given that our society is rapidly becoming more and more post-literate, with even the signs on the lavatory doors now in pictogram form, and reading eclipsed as a leisure activity by TV and computer games, the only real pressure on many of these children to learn to read comes from school, and if the school is undisciplined or chaotic, and many are, a lot of these mistaught children will drop out or misbehave, a terrible waste of talent, since often such children have great potential.
This could be why 'dyslexia' is often seen as a middle class problem, since the working-class children who cannot read disappear off the national radar, and their parents are often inarticulate and powerless, or themselves suffering from a bad education. Some of them turn up later in prison, where illiteracy ( or is it still 'dyslexia' behind bars?) is common.
So it is mainly the middle class children - whose parents believe government propaganda about improving schools, or who buy poor-quality private schooling in the sad belief that the writing of a cheque guarantees quality teaching - who get involved in the great 'dyslexia' fantasy. They know that something is wrong. The 'dyslexia' lobby persuades them that it is their children who are at fault. This helps relieve parents and schools of any responsibility for the problem. The children, too, are led to believe that they are in the grip of some force that is beyond their control. This is why so many people willingly co-operate in their own victimhood.
Now here's the interesting bit about Professor Elliott, whose original article was summarised and reported on in 'The Times' of May 28th by Peta Bee.
This is a passage from her report: "For parents, in particular, a diagnosis that their child is dyslexic can be a relief, says Elliot. He believes the diagnosis serves an emotional, not a scientific, function. "There is huge stigma attached to low intelligence. After years of working with parents I have seen how they don't want their child to be considered lazy, thick or stupid. If they get called this medically recognised term, dyslexic, then it is a signal to all that it's not to do with intelligence."
This was misrepresented by some of my pro-dyslexia correspondents as Professor Elliott having described those who claim to suffer from 'dyslexia ' as "lazy, thick or stupid". As is clear from the quotation above, he said no such thing. Nor did I. Yet I have no doubt that among supporters of this campaign the suggestion will be spread that I have done so.
Inability to read has nothing to do with intelligence, and a lot to do with teaching. Nobody is more concerned than I am that children should be taught to read properly, and those who have been failed by primary schools should be rescued as quickly as possible. The ability to read is essential to education - and in my view to a civilised life. But the dyslexia industry prevents a proper reform of reading teaching, by blaming the children for the failings of schools and teachers.
That is why I am so concerned to counter the 'Dyslexia' lobby. As long as this absurdity is widely believed, the real failing will not be dealt with, and huge numbers of children will emerge from years of school with poor, inadequate or non-existent reading skills. The resources and manpower now devoted to 'dyslexia' would be much better spent on bringing proper reading teaching back to every primary classroom in the country.
