Lessons in dyslexia

The term ‘dyslexia’ has always been emotive, and it remains so. Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko’s book The Dyslexia Debate (2014) has done nothing to dispel the controversy. In a recent paper, ‘Why Children Fail To Read’, Sir Jim Rose, an apologist for dyslexia, said, ‘Dyslexia continues to come under fire as a myth. At its unkindest, this myth portrays dyslexia as an expensive invention to ease the pain of largely, but not only, middle-class parents who cannot bear to have their child thought of as incapable of learning to read for reasons of low intelligence, idleness, or both.’ Rose emphasises that both environmental and genetic factors influence reading ability and finishes by saying, ‘Dyslexia is not yet well enough understood as an extreme reading disorder for which we have precise solutions,’ which isn’t a particularly reassuring conclusion. Whatever the cause, early identification of pupils who are struggling to learn to read and write remains an obvious ambition.