If we could run time forward, what might we see? Cruising the electronic archives in, say, the year 2050, we may read that a gruelling educational controversy rumbled on for many years each side of the millennium in respect of what we called ‘dyslexia’ at that time. Thankfully, we will note that we have been able to resolve this issue or, as it turned out, these issues. We will see that a lot of what seemed to be evidence for one thing was really evidence for many others. We will read that the hoary and mystifying syndrome we once called ‘dyslexia’ turned out to be a mix of various social influences, whose reality we were reluctant to admit, and a few neurological deficits, none of them specifically related to literacy. We will see that part of the problem was that literacy was regarded as so important that passionate and sometimes inappropriate pressure was unwittingly applied to early learners in the days before the real nature and purpose of education was fully understood. We will note that many people, in those days, developed affective defences against, and thereby sometimes extraordinary responses to, literacy, often to the process of education itself. It will pain us to read that many people were considerably intellectually reduced as a result. As well as this, though, we will read that we understand better those few neurological syndromes, which, although they are not specific to it, may secondarily affect literacy.
‘Dyslexia’ will have joined the many psychological ideas which seem faintly embarrassing now, but which once seemed so straightforwardly commonsensical. It will lie, mouldy and neglected in the attic of psychological history, alongside the homunculus, the phrenology head, the ink blot and behaviourism. If we should ever catch sight of it there, among the invigorating but wrong ideas of previous times, we will recognise it as just another casualty of dogged scepticism and the scientific method.