Who is going to break it to Jamie Oliver that dyslexia likely does not exist? And when they do, will the famous cook be delighted that he has at last been freed from the burden of this mythical complaint? Or will he be cross?
I’d guess cross. For dyslexia is one of those rare afflictions that people actually want to have. In this, it is like its equally fictional cousin ADHD. Both have no objective, testable, falsifiable diagnosis. Yet both bring certain privileges to those who think they have them.
Recipients of ‘disabled students’ allowance’ may receive extra time to take exams, a ‘scribe’, a ‘reader’, ‘assistive software’ or modified exam papers. Sometimes there are cheap or even free laptops kitted out with ‘supportive spell-check software’.
Both ADHD and dyslexia can qualify the parents of children diagnosed with them for untaxed welfare payments which are not means-tested. ADHD gets you NHS prescriptions for stimulant drugs, remarkably similar to illegal amphetamines, for which there is a substantial black market among the indisputably healthy. I’m glad to say that so far there is no pill specifically for dyslexia. Both lift a burden of responsibility from the sufferer, from his or her parents and above all from the schools they go to.
This is also a multi-million pound industry – there are now alleged to be 870,000 children with dyslexia in Britain. And those who dare criticise it can expect a lot of howls of rage. Hence the near-universal praise heaped on people such as Jamie Oliver who identify as dyslexia patients.
Mr Oliver has been granted the huge privilege of making a TV documentary on dyslexia, to be shown on Channel 4 later this year. How brave! Or is it? Who is the embattled minority here? Dyslexia believers, or those who doubt its existence?
Mr Oliver explained yesterday on the BBC that while he was very happy at school, he couldn’t read or write or spell, and so struggled. He famously got two GCSEs. ‘I was running away from words, from reading and writing. I thought it was just me. But there were hundreds of thousands of us every year.’
He said that the self-worth and self-esteem of many children like him evaporated under the age of ten. And I believe him. If you can’t read, school is a misery. But the explanation is not dyslexia. How could it be? Nobody can even agree on exactly what it is.
Jamie Oliver has revealed that he struggled at school because he couldn’t read, write or spell. He famously got two GCSEs
Everyone who cannot read properly is affected in different ways by this lack. But the method urged to overcome it is much the same as the method urged by traditional reading teachers down the ages. This is what is known as ‘synthetic phonics’ (SP), in which children are taught to associate a particular sound with each letter. I was taught in this way by my mother, who was taught by her mother and simply passed the gift to me. I can still remember the afternoon in an attic on the edge of Dartmoor, aged four, when I finally stumbled into literacy, reading the words ‘they meant well’ from an ancient 1930s Tiger Tim annual, which she had used as her teaching aid.
It was the word ‘meant’ that held me up. Once I conquered the ‘e’ and the ‘a’ together, nothing could stop me.
One London teacher, the Hungarian Eva Retkin, maintained for years that she could teach any child to read if he or she knew the alphabet. Challenged to do so by one national newspaper, she fulfilled her promise. At the age of 80, long after retirement, she was still doing it, and declared ‘I always had about 30 pupils in my class and so I assume a few of those were dyslexic, if that’s what you want to call it, but it made no difference. They all learned to read before going on to secondary school. Every single one of them.’
This is no surprise to conservative reading experts. Ten years ago, The Dyslexia Debate was published. It is a rigorous study of this alleged ailment by two distinguished academics – Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University, and Professor Elena Grigorenko of Yale University. They made several points. There is no clear definition or objective diagnosis. Nobody can agree on how many people suffer from it. Yet you would barely know such a book existed, judging by the way the mainstream of our society continues to speak and write of dyslexia as if it is an established fact.
Elliott and Grigorenko are not alone. Parliament’s Select Committee on Science and Technology said in 2009: ‘There is no convincing evidence that, if a child with dyslexia is not labelled as dyslexic, but receives full support for his or her reading difficulty, that the child will do any worse than a child who is labelled dyslexic and then receives special help.’ This is because both are given exactly the same treatment. But as Elliott and Grigorenko say: ‘Being labelled dyslexic can be perceived as desirable for many reasons.’ These include the extra resources and extra time in exams that are now so common.
The TV chef is making a documentary on dyslexia, which is set to be shown on Channel 4 later this year
But then there’s the hope that it will ‘reduce the shame and embarrassment that are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. It may help exculpate the child, parents and teachers from any perceived sense of responsibility’. And that is true. It is why anyone who doubts the existence of dyslexia can expect abuse rather than a reasoned response, precisely because the diagnosis liberates everyone involved from any blame at all. But the children should never be blamed. It is not their fault. The fault lies elsewhere.
As the American author Rudolf Flesch (an Austrian refugee from Hitler) wrote 70 years ago in his blockbuster book Why Johnny Can’t Read, the problem is a very old one in the USA and in Britain. It is almost entirely down to the use of mistaken new methods of reading teaching (mainly ‘look and say’).
During the 1930s and 1940s the idea that children would learn to read better by recognising whole words caught on with progressive teachers and began to displace traditional methods. Flesch’s argument, for the immediate resumption of teaching by phonics, was largely ignored by the teaching profession in Britain until very recently.
But in 2005, undeniable research in Clackmannanshire in Scotland made it impossible to ignore the truth. The seven-year study showed (as Retkin and Flesch could have told them) that SP was highly effective in teaching children to read.
Do most UK schools now use SP as they are supposed to do by law in England? How can we really know? Getting teachers to do what they do not want to do is far tougher than herding cats, and I suspect many of them regard SP as ‘authoritarian’ or something of the kind.
What is certain is that many ‘progressive’ teachers (and that is a lot of teachers) still view SP with suspicion. A recent paper by academics Charlotte Hacking and Dominic Wise attacks SP, saying that a ‘rigid approach’ to teaching phonics is ‘joyless’ and is failing children.
I suspect we still have plenty of dyslexia to come, before Johnny can read again without trouble.
