One of the regular topics of discussion on our List serve  is about learning to read and write in Costello Syndrome. This struck a cord, and one night I found myself waking from a bad dream after re-living some of my own childhood experiences of  acquiring reading skills.

Readers of  this site may notice that sometimes my spelling and grammar get a little confused. You see  I am dyslexic. What I find interesting is how education today has changed so much from the education I received when I was at young.

I started school 49 years ago at the age of 4, following in the footsteps of my slightly older brother who was always doing well, he was an early reader, and I was expected to be the same.

My early school life was a struggle, as the years passed my skills did not improve. The reaction of the  teachers  was to call me lazy, useless, retarded. Words that have haunted me all of my life. This should not have been the case, because many years before the American physician  Dr  Samuel Torrey Orton had pioneered the study of learning disability. He is best known for his work examining the causes and treatment of reading disability, or dyslexia. Ref: Wikipedia

So 35 years after dyslexia and methods of  education for people with the condition was both recognised and understood I was labelled as lazy and useless. And the problem with labels is they stick.  Nobody takes the  time to look under the label, to see if there is any truth to what is written, and because the label is written by a teacher, a person of  power, the contents of the label gain a new godlike power that nobody is willing to question.

So with this label stuck firmly I progressed through primary to secondary school, where I came in contact with new teachers, and new ways of learning. And at the same time, this label became a bacon to how the teachers would treat me until I would leave school, at 15 with almost no primary or secondary education skills.  The worst part of my school life was trying to gain what was my right,  knowledge and leaning,  was that the educators saw an opportunity to bully and abuse me in ways that would be illegal today. Every other Friday afternoon English we would be given 20 words to learn the spellings. If we did not learn the words that would mean only one thing, a visit to the headmaster for a beating with the cane for being lazy. In time I became used to this ritual humiliation, excepting the beatings as my lot, to be excepted as part of going to school.

Yet in a strange way I was lucky, I had marketable skills, I learned tailoring at the knee of my grandfather, sowing for him by hand as his arthritis made holding a needle difficult.  On Leaving school I became a tailor, and later worked as a designer. Dyslexia had taught me one thing, how to use my memory, I discovered I did not need to write things down as I gained an education, I just remembered bypassing the need for pen and paper. With that realisation I gained a degree and the rest is history.

But what of today, what about the education of my daughter who due to Costello Syndrome, finds it equally difficult to learn to read and write as I did. She is almost 16, can read and write a few words, but I am sure she knows a lot more then she is letting on. She also has a memory that an elephant would be proud of, and she can use her memory to great advantage. Her school treats and educates with compassion and understanding, she has labels, and just because her reading skills are limited, nobody has said that  she will never read, or does not have the ability to do so.

Education has changed a lot in the generation since I left school, and in the years that stretch between me and Helaina the labels have lost there glue. We both share  an enormous love of the written word, but today those words are in the form of audio books and story CD’s. For me my journey into literature has taken many years for the technology to fill the reading gap, and for Helaina her journey is just starting. After all who need to read when you have MP3′s.