#96. Dyslexia Is a Catch-All Diagnosis for Reading Difficulties, with Multiple Causes

Dear friends,

In Letter #95, with the admittedly provocative title “Is Dyslexia a School-Produced Disorder?,”I suggested that dyslexia may often result from pressure in school. I suggested that some students may feel traumatized by school pressure to read, especially to read aloud in front of others, which can lead to a persistent fear and dislike of reading, which can interfere with subsequent learning to read and eventuate in a diagnosis of dyslexia. Continued pressure to read may, for them, be counterproductive. I presented four lines of evidence supporting this theory:

(1) In an online survey of families where a child who had been diagnosed with dyslexia was subsequently removed from school for homeschooling, all ten respondents said, essentially, that their child was traumatized by reading at school, hated the thought of reading, and only began learning to read after an extended period in which pressure to read was completely removed.

(2) Staff members at the Sudbury Valley School, where there is no pressure to read, report that they have never seen a case of genuine inability to learn to read, including among students diagnosed as dyslexic prior to becoming students there.

(3) A large experimental study of the effect of teaching reading and other academic skills to four-year-olds found that such training greatly increased the percentage of students who, by 6^th grade, were diagnosed with a learning disorder (including dyslexia). This is consistent with the idea that earlier pressure to read, for children not ready for it and made anxious by it, may be a cause of the ever-increasing rate of diagnosed dyslexia.

(4) Researchers have regularly found a significant correlation between anxiety, especially social anxiety, and dyslexia among schoolchildren, consistent with the idea that children prone to anxiety about performing in front of others may be predisposed to reading problems because of feeling traumatized when reading in front of others in the classroom.

The idea that school-induced anxiety about reading contributes to the prevalence of diagnosed dyslexia is an idea one does not encounter in the voluminous literature on dyslexia. That literature too often leads to the false impression that incidences of dyslexia are solely explained by inherited brain differences. So, I wanted to bring evidence of another cause to readers’ attention. Again, the title of Letter #95 was a question: “Is dyslexia a school-produced disorder?” My answer, as you might have inferred, is neither a clear