Dyslexia or shut down kids?

Here is something I read in the internet this morning. You may read the whole article here:

Here are some extracts from the article above with my comments.

Dyslexia is believed to affect one in every five people.

But dyslexia is not a hopeless affliction, as once believed. Scientists can observe its effects through brain scans as easily as they can observe a tumor.

 My comment: Stop! Think! Is it really possible that one in five – 20% of the population of the world is dyslexic? What is dyslexia anyway? 

Initially it was defined as IQ discrepancy and surprisingly that definition lasted for a long time.

When I first started to do some search on dyslexia in 2004 it was said that it was a phonological awareness deficit. This definition replaced the IQ definition from around 1970. That theory lasted for about 45 years. I was the first person to challenge that definition. You may read many of my posts on this by searching for it under ‘Luqman phonological awareness’.

Recently some scientists from France had ‘discovered’ that “Dyslexia could be caused by light receptors in the eyes that confuse the brain by producing "mirror" images”.

Utter nonsense!

All I can see is that the Western world has a creative mind. They have been talking about dyslexia for decades and the dyslexic population appears to keep increasing from around 5% when I started reading about dyslexia in 2004 and then it became 10% and a few years ago it is claimed to be 20%.

Like cancer, it can infiltrate many aspects of a person’s life. Also like cancer, it can be treated. While it cannot be cured, it can be overcome with effective, preferably early, interventions as simple as group reading several times a week. But where are the interventions?

This is the question Dr. Sally Shaywitz is still asking after some 30 years of studying dyslexia. It’s a question every Texan should be asking, too.

“Rather than a knowledge gap, we have an action gap,” Shaywitz, a professor of pediatrics at Yale University School of Medicine, told me in a recent interview. “We have to act on the knowledge we have, and we haven’t done that, and it’s absurd.”

This is the kind of nonsense that PhD’s like Shaywitz keep dishing out for naïve gullible parents to swallow hook line and sinker.

I am writing a book on this and will be published by June this year and I hope you will read it and grill me on what I am writing.

Meanwhile let us see what experts have been saying for years:

“In a large study conducted by scientists from the State University of New York at Albany, researchers were able to reduce the number of children who require ongoing remediation from the National average of 30% down to about 2%!

Another study by researchers at Florida State University showed how the most severely reading disabled students could reach grade level - and stay there- using a surprisingly brief intervention program.”

To quote Shaywitz above “We have to act on the knowledge we have, and we haven’t done that, and it’s absurd.”

The action to take would be to find out how a short period of intervention could reduce the rate from 30% to 2%. How were the kids able to be brought to grade level and maintained at that level?

The action to take would be to find out why the kids needed intervention in the first place.

“Ninety-five percent of the kids hitting the wall in learning to read are what we call NBT: Never Been Taught.” (Dr.Reid Lyon)

‘Failure to read is often to do with the nature of the teaching rather than the nature of the child' (Rose 2009)

"They think they are a failure. They think there's something wrong with them [but] there's something wrong with our teaching not with the child, and with the proper intervention and teaching, we can do so much," (Dr Maryanne Wolf) 

“If the learner hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught, and that it's not a question of the learner's ability, it's a question of the teacher's ability. These kids are capable of learning, certainly at different rates, but learning anything we want to teach them.” (Engelmann)

“The education establishment, rather than admit that their eclectic and incomplete methods for instruction are at fault, have invented a brain disorder called ‘dyslexia'” (Graham Stringer MP)

“The only shut down that I allocate time to is that of the educators and other professionals who are not embracing empirical science and hence are withholding highly effective methods from children - and thus are contributing to the problem of dyslexia’s prevalence and not its solution.” (Tim Conway PhD)

….Fewer children would need Reading Recovery if they had received appropriate instruction in the first place. Teachers are left to discover effective classroom practices because they haven’t been taught them. One of the first discoveries is the irrelevance of most of the theory they have learned. Some of the concepts are impractical, or don’t work, or don’t work as well as something else, like instruction.” (Mark Seidenberg)

The above quotations should be able to convince that the problem with ‘dyslexics’ not being able to read is ‘Dystechia’. 

I believe that there are kids who may be dyslexic but the percentage cannot be any higher than say 2%. 

There are many more quotations as above but there is nothing about what is it that they are teaching wrongly. 

Wait for my book that should be available around the world by June this year.

“We are born ignorant but we have to work hard to remain stupid.”

 (Benjamin Franklin)