Do You Read Me?

Learning Difficulties, Dyslexia and the Denial of Meaning

J.F. Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429912863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

A fascinating and compelling exploration of the learning process for parents, teachers, and anyone with an interest in education. Reading and writing are fundamentally about the communication of meaning. Yet, when a child has difficulty in learning to read and write, the one area that is never seen as having any relevance is the child's life experiences. The author's contention is that the concept of dyslexia is something that has been invented, rather than discovered, in order to evade the question of meaning and the understanding of the individual. Based on the author's thirty years' experience of both educational psychology and analytical therapy, the book sets out a radical approach to learning difficulties in which the primary assumption is that there will usually be underlying emotional conflicts, tensions, and anxieties. Any learning disability is thus more likely to be the symptom of less-evident, personal difficulties, rather than a problem in itself. The book examines, with examples, typical patterns of personal and emotional difficulty that give rise to learning problems.

PART I

READING DISABILITY

CHAPTER ONE

The dyslexia muddle

Literacy has always been equated with education, knowledge, and intelligence. In the days before even printing had been invented, it is not difficult to see how this could have come about. People could learn trades, skills, and crafts from their parents or through an apprenticeship, but the only way of acquiring knowledge built up by previous generations, like history, philosophy, literature, and mathematics was by learning to read and write.

Just before the Norman Conquest, England had a Saxon king called Aethelred who was known as “the unred” or “the unready” meaning he was not very educated—or, as we might say today “not very well read”. Historians still seem to be divided as to whether this title simply meant that he had not acquired the skills of literacy or whether it describes the general view that he was not a very wise ruler. Whatever the truth of the matter, even in those days it must have been the case that there were many highly intelligent and gifted people whose abilities were never developed or recognised because circumstances prevented them from becoming literate. Consequently, they neither had access to all the available culture and learning in the world around them, nor were they able to communicate and disseminate their own ideas and discoveries. As the poet Thomas Gray mused about the graves of humble villagers in a country churchyard:

Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood. (Gray, 1956)

From earlier in history there must have existed a vicious circle whereby the poor and disadvantaged came to be seen as inherently backward and ignorant because of their lack of education, when in actual fact it was a combination of economic circumstances and prejudice which was preventing them from being educated. It is a sobering thought that the potential for liberation and upward mobility for a slave in the Roman Empire was probably far greater than that of a working class member of Victorian society in Britain. Not only was there the possibility of any Roman slave gaining his freedom and becoming a fully fledged Roman citizen but a great many slaves, even while they were still slaves, were literate and educated. It was not at all uncommon for a Roman household or business to rely on the services of slaves as secretaries and administrators. By contrast, the serf in Britain in the middle ages and in Russia right up to the nineteenth century had no prospect of upward mobility and was totally at the mercy of his or her master. Ground-breaking writers such as Turgenev and especially Tolstoy were deeply preoccupied with the plight of the serfs and the possibility of their liberation and education. Tolstoy even founded one of the first free schools.

The Education Act of 1870 heralded a new era of education for the whole population, but the universal availability of it did not mean that everyone learned to read and write. Now that primary education was available to all, it became clear that there was a wide variation in the extent to which children were able to make use of it. Some progressed speedily and went on to higher things while others seem to make little use of their time at school. What was the explanation for this? Upward mobility in Victorian society was limited by very fixed beliefs about the social hierarchy. Lip-service was paid to the Christian ideal of each human being of equal value in the sight of God, but what the Victorians really believed was reflected more accurately in the words of a hymn of the time:

The rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate
God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate. (Alexander, 1848)

Consequently it is not difficult to see how, against the backdrop of Victorian morality and punitive attitudes, the world at large assumed that there was a very simple equation involved in all learning, starting with basic literacy: intelligence plus hard work equals progress. If a child made little or slow progress, the assumption made was that there could only be one of two explanations: either they were stupid or lazy.

Even in the 1950s, when the ideas of Freud and psychoanalysis had made a radical impact on the way people thought about psychology, the moralistic Victorian attitude still persisted that any lack of progress in school must always be attributed to stubbornness, wilfulness or insubordination. The response was invariably punishment or humiliation, which apart from being cruel and inhumane is itself fundamentally stupid since it was obviously as unproductive as kicking the car because it won’t start.

The word “stupid” could perhaps more accurately be replaced by the word “unscientific”. The simplest of research projects would have shown immediately that punishing and humiliating children not only failed to produce progress in learning to read but actually obstructed it. In fact it would not have been necessary even to construct a research project. Any punishment book or list of offenders would have shown that it was the same names which occurred over and over again which is the clearest evidence that reward and punishment (particularly punishment) simply does not work, and this applies most of all to problems in learning.

How was it that generations of children with learning problems had their lives made a misery in this way as a result of a complete failure to comprehend the problem, while in the rest of the world the application of rational thought had progressed far enough to allow the development of nuclear fission and would shortly be able to put human beings on the moon?

In order to answer this question, we will need to recognise something very fundamental about the way human beings make sense of their world. Human understanding requires the utilisation of two opposing faculties. The one is the emotional response to experience and the other is the capacity to think about it. Thinking requires and produces the objectivity of being separate from what you are trying to understand. Feeling requires and produces the subjectivity of being involved with and connected with what you’re trying to understand. In each individual person and in civilisation as a whole, the essential question is how good a balance or amalgamation exists between the two. Excessive objectivity (devoid of any emotional experience) ultimately leads to the extremes of autistic functioning where nothing exists but facts or figures. Excessive subjectivity (devoid of thought and reflection) ultimately leads to psychotic states of delusions and chaos.

In the early development of western civilisation, when the capacity to think rationally was beginning to evolve, the thinking and feeling side of life remained less differentiated. A supreme example of this would be the genius of Leonardo da Vinci who was able to combine amazing artistic ability with extraordinary scientific thinking. He was the prototype of the “renaissance man” who is equally at home with literature, science, art, and music. As civilisation developed, the rational and the emotional capacities gradually got separated and specialised, splitting into the sciences and the arts or humanities. As this happened, a sort of swing of the pendulum began to occur between the tendency to focus on the more concrete thinking end of the spectrum, on the one hand, and the more imaginative feeling end, on the other. The age of Enlightenment was a time when the pendulum swung to the objective, thinking end of the spectrum, whereas the era before it, the Romantic era, was the opposite.

In our current age, various factors have caused the pendulum to swing almost off the end of the spectrum in the direction of scientific objectivity. One of the consequences of this is that, together with massive technological advances, man has come unconsciously to view himself as something mechanical and concrete which can be studied scientifically without any reference to feeling or emotion. Various other factors have exacerbated this during the twentieth century. Marxism has contributed a great deal in encouraging people to see themselves as being at the mercy of external, economic forces which had to be fought, as contrasted with Freud who saw people as mainly being at the mercy of unconscious inner forces which had to be understood.

Underlying the belief that learning difficulties are the product of either laziness or stupidity is the assumption that everything is a mechanism under each person’s conscious control. It follows, then, that if a student fails to learn, either the mechanism is faulty (they are stupid) or they are not trying to operate it properly (they are lazy).

In the 150 or so years since the Education Act attitudes towards educational failure have changed considerably, but have they necessarily changed for the better? Nowadays, any child or student (in the western world at any rate) who is failing at school tends to be seen as someone suffering from a problem for which they need help as opposed to a delinquent or a defective. Largely, this is a result of a massive shift in what informs the value system of the western world. In the Victorian era hierarchy and religion ruled supreme, but even by the time the education act was passed, both the social hierarchy and religious belief were beginning to be under attack and to get eroded. A pivotal example of this was the way in which Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution collided head-on with the creationist mentality which endorsed Archbishop Ussher’s calculation of the date of the creation of the world as Sunday 23rd October 4004 BC.

It was about this time that the domain of personal problems was subject to a massive takeover bid by the medical profession. Hitherto, someone with problems in how they felt or thought, or with their relationships, would seek out a wise and experienced person to advise them. It was assumed that if your life was going wrong, there was something to be learned or understood. Sometimes this wise person might be a priest, since a common source of distress is a problem of conscience or morality. Most often it was just an older, more experienced person that was sought. With the expectation that science must provide the answers to everything, personal problems became medical conditions which could be treated by anyone using medical science with the aid of medication or even surgery.

In the educational field, the view of learning difficulties was subject to the same paradigm shift from moral to scientific. The attitudes, feelings, and personal experience of the child or student could not be imagined to have any relevance. All problems must be the result of some kind of mechanical fault of which the failing student was a helpless victim. This kind of thinking quickly focussed on the cases of people who had lost the ability to read and write as a result of brain injuries and trauma on the battlefield. Although there must have been examples of this occurring from time to time from accidents in peace time, it was only when significant numbers of people turned up who had lost (and sometimes later regained) their skills in literacy as a result of injuries in war, that the medical world was confronted with the fact that the ability to read and write could be influenced by factors other than intelligence or motivation.

So what were these factors? The obvious, immediate answer provided by the war injuries, was that the factors were physiological or neurological. If someone who can read and write to a high standard could suddenly lose the ability as a result of brain injury, was it possible that in cases of children who seemed not to be able to learn to read, that there was something the matter with their brains which made it difficult or impossible for them to learn in the first place? It was not difficult to find examples of children who quite clearly had things wrong with their central nervous system—like cerebral palsy, for example—which was equally clearly affecting their motor skills and academic functioning. Perhaps even when a child showed no obvious signs of having any neurological problems, there might be some subtle abnormality of which reading disability was the only symptom.

It was assumptions based on this type of thinking that seem to have given birth to the concept of dyslexia.

Let us now go back to the question of the scientific bias. It is tempting to think, as some people have done that the idea of dyslexia came about entirely because of the focus on brain damage brought about by war injuries. But let us pause for a moment and look at some of the other realisations and discoveries which had been made by this time.

In the sphere of the effects of war injuries, Bion’s work had clearly established the phenomenon of shell shock, or what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Before the beginning of the century, Sigmund Freud had made a major impact on society with his work on hysteria and had demonstrated that it is possible for someone to be apparently mute, blind or even paralysed when there was nothing physically the matter with them, and yet be quite unable to do anything about this through simple willpower.

The profession of the educational psychologist had been launched with the work of Sir Cyril Burt, which is evidence of the fact that it had now been recognised that a child could be much more or less intelligent than they appeared to be, and this could be established by administering standardised tests. As a result it had come to be generally recognised by the teaching world that a child could be failing because, contrary to appearances, the work being given was much too hard for him or her. Conversely a child could be frustrated and difficult in class because they had the ability of a much older child.

With all of these things going on in the groundswell of people’s thinking, how was it that this assumption developed that reading disability could only have a neurological basis? The answer is to be found in the shift from people’s unconscious assumptions, or worldview, from one of morality and meaning to a mechanistic one. But even within the context of its own thinking, it does not take much to see that there is something deeply illogical going on here.

We can illustrate this more clearly by looking at the meaning of the word dyslexia itself. The derivation is quite simple: the suffix dys comes from the Greek meaning “difficulties with” while lexia means “reading”. So the term means no more and no less than “reading difficulties”. Let us compare it with a similar medical term—dyspepsia which means digestive difficulties. If a doctor presents the case of a patient to his or her colleagues as suffering from dyspepsia, the next question would be what sort of dyspepsia? The digestive system can be upset by many different factors, anxiety, bad diet, ulcers, even stomach cancer. But it would be absurd for a doctor to say that he diagnosed the patient’s digestive problems as being caused by dyspepsia, because all that dyspepsia means is digestive problems!

Similarly, if dyslexia means “reading difficulties” it should automatically lead to the question of what factors were contributing to the reading difficulties? There are, indeed, many possible candidates. They include eye problems, hearing problems, cultural conflict, insecurity, anxiety, and other kinds of emotional blocks, as well as neurological problems. This, however, is not what we find. Once a student has been pronounced dyslexic the invariable (and unspoken) assumption is that this is a purely organic, medical condition (like, for example, diabetes) which has mysteriously happened and is completely unconnected with the child’s personality, background, culture, relationships, feelings about life, attitude towards school, learning and particularly the way he or she is taught.

In my years as an educational psychologist I was consulted over literally hundreds of children who had been “diagnosed” as dyslexic yet I cannot remember a single case where the psychologists and teachers involved had shown any serious interest in the personal and individual make-up of the student concerned as having any possible relevance. Vividly etched in my mind is a consultation with a desperately anxious and unhappy girl of ten years old who volunteered the information to me that she had incidents of faecal incontinence (“soiling”). Soiling in a child of that age in the absence of any obvious medical condition, is a symptom of a serious degree of emotional disturbance. Moreover, it is nearly always found in boys, so that for a girl to manifest it suggests particularly severe psychopathology. The fact that this poor child managed to muster the courage to confide this to a strange, male psychologist is some indication of how desperate she was for help. After expressing sympathy for the problem and appreciation of her courage and honesty in telling me about it, I asked what the people at the Dyslexia Institute had thought about it. With a sigh of resignation she said, “Oh they weren’t interested in that sort of thing!”

Because all reading disability problems are assumed to be a neurological dysfunction in which meaning and emotions have absolutely no part to play, any obvious problems in the child’s personality, social situation or emotional development are assumed to be either irrelevant or a consequence of the dyslexia. So, for example, if a child with reading difficulties is aggressive, it must be because he is frustrated by not being able to read. It is inconceivable that his aggression and his reading disability are both symptoms of some deeper problem. Dyslexia is tacitly assumed to have the status of a purely organic condition, like diabetes.

Just as the only course of action for a diabetic is to have insulin and avoid sugar, so it is assumed the main need for the dyslexic has to be given more time in exams, equipped with techniques for managing the “disability”. However, while there is a physical reality involved in diabetes—an auto-immune condition prevents the pancreas from making insulin so the blood cannot absorb sugars, the supposedly neurological “causes” of dyslexia have no clearly identifiable, organic basis. Researchers have assembled massive amounts of data about ...