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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> And, yes, I agree that it is way over diagnosed and schools should get out 
> of the diagnosing business.  However, that doesn't negate the reality of a 
> problem that "some" folks have.


As  I might have mentioned when this thing came around before, I had ample 
oppertunity to observe this close up and for some time.  

No medical person (competent, any way) will tell you that dyslexia is a 
disease or syndrome like a legitimate medical diagnosis.  Having seen several 
hundred "cases" close up, these things emerge:

1)  The supposed indicators may be entirely absent and yet the child will be 
determined to be 'dsylexic'

2) The indicators are present in other children, often all of them and often 
very pronounced, and they have no difficulty learning to read.

3) The supposed "blocks" to reading can (and in my expierence - always!) be 
circumvented as if they didn't exist when the child is motivated and ready


Those of us in "special education" who could in a moment of lucidness see 
past the "difficult for a man to understand something when is income depends 
on 
his not understaning it" saw clearly that what was happening is that we had 
all 
these children who could not read and THEN we found some of the indicators 
and so it was '"Ah, so they are dyslexic, yeah, that's the ticket, it's not 
our 
fault at all, nor the parents', it's the dyslexia, that's it."

However, this in the day of avid if not rabid screening for all sorts of 
imagined learning problems, an honest look at the data showed that while we 
were 
using the indicators and "diagnoses" as a basis for explaining the lack of 
reading, unlike any other actual medical condidtion, using those indicators 
to 
PREDICT dyslexia didn't even come statistically close.

I'm not basing this on a nephew or the neighbor kid or someone I heard of, 
I'm basing this being directly involved as a "professional" with hundreds of 
children who where supposely "dyslexic" or whatever the malady du jour was at 
the 
time to explain our failure.

One of my daughters displays all the classic indicators of dyslexia the most 
stark of which is that she sees figures and words backwards.  Mechanically 
and 
invariably most numbers and letters are written backwards and the order of 
words and numbers are remembered backwards.  When someone leaves a phone 
number 
that daughter has written down, we know to dial it backwards.  (and she has 
all the rest as well).  As unschoolers we left her alone to find her way 
about 
that.  She was reading fluently by eight.  Also, and my story is it's because 
we didn't interfer with her, she can look at one of her dolls or a person, 
and 
recently a puppy, one time and  sew, knit, or crochet a garment for them and 
it fits perfectly the first time.

This is just the in the way of illustration since it is easier to say in an 
e-comment than other examples might be:  A componet of one of the alphabet 
soup 
maladies at the time was supposed to be "auditory ground figure disturbance". 
 That is, the child could not filter out what was being said from ANY 
extraneous noise or speech.  The threory being that it is constitutional and 
biological and there's not the function of preference nor conditioning.  I 
had the 
true believer teachers and the parents in my room and said I'd illustrate  
that 
the premise was bogus.  I put the child in one corner of the room and 
occupied 
him with a recording (cassette tapes at the time) which should, by the 
diagnosis, swamp out any other auditory stimuli.  I got the teachers and one 
parent 
in the middle of the room and got them to carry on a vocal conversation.  I 
turned on a loud fan and another tape player.  I went with the other parent 
to 
the far corner of the room and engaging her in a whispered conversation 
asked, 
"What does he like to do for a treat?"

She whispered "Go to Dairy Queen."   I myself facing her not three feet away 
could scarcely make out what she said.  Her son with his back to her and more 
than 20 feet away and admid quite a bit of ambient noise, swung his head 
around immediately and said, "Dairy Queen!?  Are we going to Dairy Queen?"

If it is a constitutional disfunction, how is it that 'Do every other math 
problem' could not be deciphered in a quiet room said directly to him but 
'Diary 
Queen' could be heard at a whisper twenty feet away?

Like that,  I and a number of collegues, went on a quest which was sort of 
like the Amazing Randy's offer to give a $10,000 prize to anyone who could 
demonstrate a psychic ability he could not debunk combined with pleading for 
Sodom 
and Gomorrah.  We tried to fine one so called constitutional learning 
"disability" that could not be circumvented by simply changing the 
curcumstances a 
little.   Finding just one righteous learning disabled person would have done 
it.

We never found even one.

Let me clearly define what we were after.   A few years of this experiment 
was while I was a teacher at the Tennessee School for the Deaf.  If a person 
was 
deaf, they were deaf and no mistake, especially the type of auditory nerve 
deafness that was much more common before rubella vaccinations were nearly 
universal.  If you tried to demonstrate that a deaf person could hear you (at 
a 
normal speaking voice, not loud enough to where they could feel the 
vibrations), 
you were in for a frustrations.  They could not hear you when they were happy 
or say, hungry or filled, tired or rested, bored or interested, no matter 
their mood or family history.  It didn't affect it.

But all the rest of the so called mysterious "learning disabilities" could be 
demonstrated to come and go although the spiel was that they were 
constitutional and hard wired.

Also there is this phenomenon:

Learning disabilities and especially dyslexia:

*occur much more often in single parent families and among children raised by 
someone other than their parents.

*rarely occur among private shcool and church school children

*occur in families experiencing stress and disruption


If they are a medical-type problem, why would any of that make any difference?


Dyslexia and other so called learning disabilities are best understood as an 
attempt to force a child's natural tendancy to learn their own way and in 
their own time to conform to a narrow set of expectations.  

You would not view your child as not fitting his shoes, would you?  Do 
surgery on his feet so they's fit the shoes you bought for him?  Yet that is 
exactly 
what we do with children's education.  If the child does not fit narrowly 
confined definition of learning, we must per force modify the child rather 
than 
his circumstances even to the point of giving him dangerous drugs to force 
that 
conformation.