Date published: 2007/05/29
The BBC says:
Dyslexia charities have refuted claims that the condition is a label used by middle-class parents who do not want their children seen as low achievers.
The British Dyslexia Association and Dyslexia Action said people with dyslexia had a "very real" problem.
They were responding to claims from Professor Julian Elliott, an educational psychologist at Durham University.
Professor Elliott said the term dyslexia was becoming meaningless.
But the British Dyslexia Association and Dyslexia Action said that, to the six million people in the UK living with dyslexia, it was very real.
"Dyslexia is a complex condition which affects each person differently and it is irrespective of intelligence, race or social background," the organisations said in a joint statement.
"The severity and different difficulties any one dyslexic person may present can vary. It is for this reason that definitions of dyslexia are not always consistent.
"Once again dyslexia seems to be making the headlines for all the wrong reasons. It is frustrating that the focus should be on whether dyslexia exists or not and claims that it does not is very upsetting to the one in 10 people that it effects.
"The question should be what can be done to help people with dyslexia and those with literacy difficulties?"
Middle-class parents also prefer the label dyslexia because it means that their children get extra time in exams (e.g. 45 minutes extra on 3 hour exams at Cambridge University). The Dyslexia organisations are of course typical special interest pressure groups who deem their special interest to be worthy of special attention by the rest of society. You can take any measure in life, and then almost by definition the bottom 10% of achievers must have some special condition, and if you can give it a medical name, suddenly these people are supposed to be deemed worthy of special attention. There are students at Cambridge University who most people would deem to have real literacy issues (and in subjects where literacy issues should not be a disqualification to their field of study, e.g. mathematics). There are other students whose parents have managed to play the system and get them labelled as dyslexic so they are given special privileges and excuses.
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