I have recently been sent a mailing among which was an advert for an adult dyslexia organisation. This took the form of a bookmark with their website address on it and a cartoon at one end. This depicted a tiny man, the corners of his mouth turned down in utter misery; his eyes wide open in sorry bewilderment, his fingers hopelessly clutching the window ledge in front of him. The window he peered so desolately out of was that of a prison cell. The bars of the window were made of oversized pencils, tall and bulky, completely dwarfing the demoralised, defeated, and presumably dyslexic prisoner. Escape looked remote and improbable - on the evidence of the cartoon impossible. The message was clear. This is how it is to be dyslexic! This is industrial strength learned helplessness, being powerfully transmitted.
In chapters six and seven we looked into affect. We saw how important attributions can be and how they can contaminate the unconscious; that maladaptive attributions can induce learned helplessness and that they can do this in teacher or student or both. In educational contexts a maladaptive attribution is likely to be the attribution of failure (or difficulty) to innate and irremediable causes, to something we cannot do much, or anything, about. When we diagnose ‘dyslexia’ we are attributing failure to a deficit, to an unfortunate kink in the brain. Dyslexia is innate (it’s the victim’s problem, it’s their hardware that’s at fault). Dyslexia is also mysterious and irremediable (we have no idea how, if at all, we could repair this hardware; we’re stuck with the fault).
Attributing literacy difficulty to such a debilitating cause disempowers, and learned helplessness is exactly such disempowerment. Occasionally it is consciously apparent as in ‘I was very unhappy. I was told I’d never be able to read or write - I was told this by an educational psychologist.’ (Open learning project p. 37). Or as one unfortunate ‘dyslexic’ remarked ‘... our minds are wired differently ... the result is we’ve ended up with muddle in our minds.’ (Miles & Varma 1994 p. 58.) Sometimes helplessness is also carefully and consciously transmitted to the hapless student as in a widely distributed book purporting to enable ‘tutors in adult, further and higher education’ to diagnose dyslexia:
Dyslexia is a disability or specific learning difficulty which needs to be identified and clarified with the student. This is not because of some desire to label students but because students need to understand that their difficulties will not go away with tuition, practice, hard work etc. (Klein 2003 p. 82.)
A student is quoted in another book widely disseminated among teachers of literacy to adults (Lee 2002 p.22). This student, Clive, writes a poem called ‘Dyslexia’ and it contains these lines:
Only myself to blame
A life sentence
My heart sobs at the news
I am a prisoner for a crime I have not committed
Will I ever be a free man?
It seems likely that the unfortunate Clive has already concluded that the answer is probably ‘No’. Indeed, after being told that he has a neurological deficit, a permanent and irremediable disability, how could it be otherwise?