Dyslexia--Middle Class Way to Hide Stupidity?

The reaction to this story is not going to be pretty:

Dyslexia is a social fig leaf used by middle-class parents who fear their children will be labelled as low achievers, a professor has claimed.

Julian Elliott, a leading educational psychologist at Durham University, says he has found no evidence to identify dyslexia as a medical condition after more than 30 years of research.

"There is a huge stigma attached to low intelligence," he said.

"After years of working with parents, I have seen how they don't want their child to be considered lazy, thick or stupid.

"If they get called this medically diagnosed term, dyslexic, then it is a signal to all that it's not to do with intelligence."

He added: "There are all sorts of reasons why people don't read well but we can't determine why that is. Dyslexia, as a term, is becoming meaningless."

One in ten people in the UK - including 375,000 schoolchildren - has been diagnosed with dyslexia.

The condition is said to impair short-term memory and the ability to read, write, spell and do maths.

Supporters of the condition argue that dyslexics are intelligent people who have difficulties processing information and need extra help and time than others who are poor readers.

But Professor Elliott has claimed that the symptoms of dyslexia - such as clumsiness and letter reversal - are similar to those seen in those who simply cannot read.

He argues that the condition should be rediagnosed as a reading difficulty.

His comments provoked fury among dyslexia campaigners.

You think.

Here is more likely the reality. Dyslexia exists and it does occur in some children. However, like most ADD or ADHD, it is often over-diagnosed because some parents spend too much time reading about it and then mis-interpreting actions by their kids as symptoms of the condition. Their kid is not doing well in school and rather than spending the time and effort to figure out why and determine a response, the easy thing to do is get a diagnosis of dyslexia to cover it.

Let's face it, by definition half of the kids in the world are below average in intelligence. It doesn't make them bad kids or bad students, it must makes them a statistic. Despite what we want for our kids, not every child can be an Einstein or a Marie Curie or the next Nobel Prize winner in physics or literature.

What we as a society have to do is learn to come to grips with teh differences in children and stop trying to acribe slow progress in school to some sort of medical condition. Sometimes there is a condition or a learning disability, but sometimes the child is just not the brightest bulb in the box.