Tuition designed for ‘dyslexics’ is usually aggressively (and overtly) prescriptive, technically complex, busy, stern and inquisitorial. It demands constant, fraught intellectualisation. Believers buy into this; sceptics blench. Control is entirely in the hands of ‘experts’; the student is absolutely disempowered. There is an explicit assumption that the mountain is peculiarly high and the road peculiarly rocky. They will be.
A diagnosis of dyslexia may thus function at several different levels and as several different things. On the political level it may be power; once the diagnosis is given there may be privileged access to funding and educational doors may be forced open. On the personal level it may be an alibi explanation, sparing blushes and providing a socially acceptable protection against disgrace and shame. On quite another level, though, it will act as a potent, but unremarked, handicap in the learning of literacy, inducing and entrenching learned helplessness all round. And developmental dyslexia remains controversial and may yet prove to be non-existent. It may even be all four of these different things at one and the same time.
Dyslexia is politically very powerful today. ‘… the media have accepted (why I wonder?) that the case is proven.’ (Martin 1989 p. 19.) The teacher of adult literacy works in an environment where public, management and student all accept the widespread reality of dyslexia. The teacher is obliged (by law, in the UK) to appear to accept it, and to act upon a ‘diagnosis’, even though many find it unconvincing. And dyslexia seems so emollient. ‘Anything so convenient must be right.’ (Galbraith 1962) Dyslexia is nothing if not convenient; it blames the victim, which is such a comfort to everyone else.
‘The most important purpose of education may be the inculcation … of a deep, even raucous, scepticism.’ (Galbraith 1962). In part because it is so suspiciously convenient, but also because it may be a subtly but profoundly damaging diagnosis of a condition which may itself be illusory, developmental dyslexia surely merits Galbraith’s ‘deep, even raucous, scepticism.’.
Notwithstanding all the appropriately sceptical above, of course, literacy teachers are commonly faced with students with officially sanctioned diagnoses of dyslexia, sometimes of severe dyslexia. What do you do, if you are unpersuaded? You have three choices: you may challenge the diagnosis, reinforce it or ignore it. What do I do? I am thoroughly unpersuaded, as you have seen, but even I cannot say with absolute certainty that dyslexia does not exist. We all remain too ignorant as yet for dogmatism. For this reason, and also because the diagnosis (at one level and at this moment) may be helpful to the student (it’s certainly better than being regarded as unintelligent), I do not recommend a direct challenge to the diagnosis. Neither, though, do I recommend it be accepted – this will reinforce the disability fantasy (which I believe dyslexia to be) and will, to the exact degree that this fantasy is accepted, induce learned helplessness. I am therefore driven to the third way; the ‘Mmmm...’ approach. When told a student is 'dyslexic' I say ‘Mmmm...’ and then teach as if the diagnosis had never been made; I treat the student as completely ‘normal’. I dismiss dyslexia from my own mind and soon the student will feel it fade from his too. Dyslexia, it has been my experience, eventually withers into forgotten insignificance. It is at this point that educational progress can really begin.