#95. Is Dyslexia a School-Produced Disorder?

The fundamental problem underlying dyslexia may be emotional, not cognitive.

Dear friends,

If you Google “causes of dyslexia” you will find countless claims that the cause is a cognitive deficit resulting from a genetically determined difference in the brain. But if you try to track down the nature of the cognitive deficit, or the precise brain difference involved, you will find many mutually contradictory and poorly supported claims. One review of the research a few years ago concluded there is no good evidence for localized brain differences associated with dyslexia or any of the so-called specific learning disorders, and that “all the estimates [from brain studies] are weak and noisy” (see also here). Concerning the cognitive deficit, a common claim is that the core problem lies in the ability to perceive the difference among basic language sounds, or to keep track of the sequence of such sounds. But this, too, receives at best mixed support (here and here).

Moreover, even if consistent correlations were found between dyslexia and particular brain or cognitive characteristics, that would not be proof that the latter are cause of the former. The causation could be the other way around. The brain is like the muscular system in that its anatomy and capacities vary with exercise. It is quite likely that reading changes the brain in certain ways and leads to enhancement of certain perceptual and cognitive processes.

All in all, the view that dyslexia is caused by a genetically determined brain and cognition difference from typical is little more than a guess, but it is regularly stated, by people who should know better, as if it were a fact. In practice, diagnosis of dyslexia is never made by examining the brain and rarely made by testing for basic cognitive abilities. The kids who get the label, following the official diagnostic guidelines, are those of normal or above normal intelligence who, for whatever reason, have not learned to read despite attendance at reading courses in school (Benson et al, 2020). The implicit assumption is that if you haven’t learned to read despite the school’s efforts to teach you, there must be something wrong with your brain, not the school.

I wish here to propose an alternative theory of the origin of dyslexia. I suggest dyslexia is largely an emotional problem brought on by the pressured, anxiety-inducing nature of standard reading instruction in schools. Here is some of the evidence.

Observations of dyslexic-diagnosed kids who leave conventional schooling

I first began thinking about dyslexia many years ago, when I was conducting a study of the graduates of the Sudbury Valley School (where there is no curriculum and students follow their own interests). Two of the graduates told me that they had come to the school at age 15 unable to read, with a diagnosis of dyslexia. Both told me, independently, that they learned to read within a few months of being at the school. When I asked why they were able to learn to read there when they had not learned before, both said, in different ways, that they learned because the pressure was off. One put it this way: “For the first time in my life nobody cared if I could read.” With pressure off, they could relax about reading; and with this new mental set they learned. Staff members at Sudbury Valley have regularly claimed that, over its long history (57 years at the time of this writing), with many hundreds of students, they have never seen a student who couldn’t learn to read.

It seems clear to me that the lack of dyslexia at Sudbury Valley derives from the fact that nobody there is pushed to read when they have no interest in it or aren’t ready for it. Everyone learns to read, but at widely differing ages. There is no anxiety about learning to read because students aren’t judged negatively for not reading and because the learning usually occurs naturally as part of everyday experience. For more on this, see here on how children involved in Self-Directed Education learn to read, and see Harriet Pattison’s book on learning to read among homeschoolers.

A few years ago, I conducted an informal survey on dyslexia through a blog I was writing regularly for Psychology Today. I asked readers who had a child officially diagnosed with dyslexia while in a conventional school and who were then removed for homeschooling or unschooling, to tell me about their child’s subsequent experience with reading. Ten readers who fit the criteria responded. Their stories varied, but in one way were remarkably similar. All of them said, in one way or another, that their child began to learn to read when removed from school because the pressure to read was reduced or removed. Every story made it clear that the real barrier to the child’s reading was not a cognitive barrier but an emotional one. You can read longer quotes from each of the respondents here. In the list below I’ll quote just the bits that illustrate the emotion involved. Each bulleted quotation is from a different parent, about a different child:

• “I pulled him out of school late last year as I was deeply concerned for his emotional well-being. … Whilst at school he hated reading and writing, and I struggled to get him to read anything. ... In such a short space [after 6 weeks of homeschooling] he now asks to read to us every night for up to half an hour. … I feel the real reason for his improvement is that the pressure from school has been removed and that it is coming from his own motivation and innate drive to learn.”

• “When I made the decision to pull her out [of school], we fell into unschooling…. She’s now 9 and a fluent reader… She just picked it up, because she wanted to and no one was forcing her. … She avoided reading like the plague for the first six months as she recovered from what I genuinely now think of as a reading trauma at school.”

• “His anxiety surrounding anything that looked like school was through the roof and he had no self-esteem and no confidence about his abilities.” This parent went on to say that, with time, he calmed down about it and learned to read. She added: “He is now 16 and successfully attending a mainstream college. He has an advanced vocabulary, loves Shakespeare and poetry and has ambitions as a filmmaker.”

• “He reads pretty darn well now [after 3 years of unschooling]. … I’m convinced that learning just cannot happen in the high-pressure environment of school.”

• “For a long time, she maintained her position on hating reading, but as she began to build confidence that this was something she could do after all, she began reading more and enjoying it more as well. Now, at age 11, she is reading chapter books aimed at children her age and older.”

• “When he first came out of school he was terrified to even try to read, although he loves stories and being read to; the smallest suggestion that he might try to read for himself was met with total meltdown. Our response was simply to remove the pressure.” This parent went on to say her son was just now beginning to read on his own and added: “I think the first most important thing is to remove the constant pressure from others to read.”

• “After we initially pulled him out, he started to read for the first time in his life. It was nice to see him ease into what literature could offer him instead of being totally paralyzed by it.”

• “She was very vocal about the fact that she hated reading and getting her to do any type of practice usually produced a complete meltdown. Then COVID happened and she came home. … I started using All About Reading with her… At the beginning she would only get through a little bit of the lesson before getting overwhelmed. We would have a calm down jar (water and glitter you could shake up and watch it sink to the bottom) at the ready when that happened, and she could take as much time as she needed to feel regulated again. … Two months into [such lessons] … she said, “Mom, I can read!” … “She herself said that there was just SO much pressure at school.”

The remarkable thing about these stories, to me, is not that the kids learned to read after being removed from school. That could be the result of a selection bias. Maybe only parents who had a success story to tell felt motivated to respond to my survey. The remarkable thing to me is the consistency in their claim that their child had been traumatized about reading during their school experience and only began to read after weeks or months had passed during which they experienced no pressure about reading and were therefore able to overcome the trauma.

Early academic training increases the incidence of dyslexia.

I think one of the reasons for the increased rates of diagnosis of dyslexia in recent years has to do with the national trend to start teaching reading to ever younger children, most of whom are simply not ready for such training and who suffer from it. For evidence of such suffering, I refer you to Letter #39, where you will find quotes from many kindergarten teachers who see such training as essentially child abuse, inducing shame, anxiety, low self-esteem, and anger. And now, even worse, many preschools are trying to teach reading skills to four-year-olds.

In Letter #40, I described the disastrous results of the Tennessee Pre-K experiment, in which four-year-olds from families below the poverty level, who wanted their children enrolled, were selected into the program on a purely random basis. The children, about 3,000 in all, were followed by researchers all the way to sixth grade, with the finding that, by third grade those who were in the program were performing more poorly than those who were not in the program on every academic measure and were also more likely to have been diagnosed with a specific learning disorder. By sixth grade these differences were even larger.

For our purposes here, the remarkable finding was that by sixth grade 14.5% of those from the pre-K program had been diagnosed with a learning disorder contrasted with just 8.4% in the control group, most of whom had just been home during that pre-K year. Stated differently, the pre-K program increased the rate of learning disorders by 74%. The researchers did not present a breakdown of this finding by specific type of learning disorder, but surely dyslexia would have figured prominently into the mix.

Elaboration on the emotional theory of dyslexia

My theory, based on observations such as those just reviewed, is that dyslexia derives from being forced to read, or go through the motions of reading, under pressure in school and from the shame and embarrassment that can come if you are not as good as others at it, or as good as the teacher wants you to be. Think of it. You are a little child, forced repeatedly to read out loud in front of not just your teacher but your classmates. You stumble, you are embarrassed, you feel shamed, you feel frustrated and angry about this whole thing. You develop then a mental block. I cannot do this.

Aside from the evidence I’ve already presented, other evidence derives from many studies showing a significant correlation between dyslexia diagnosis and high levels of anxiety, especially social anxiety, in schoolchildren (e.g. Buchwitz et al, 2023; Nelson & Harwood, 2011; Zuppardo et al, 2023). The common assumption of researchers is that anxiety is the result of not being able to read. What I am suggesting here, consistent with the reports above from parents of kids removed from school, is that is that anxiety is a cause of not being able to read.

Imagine two scenarios. In one, a child who, by disposition, tends to be socially anxious and therefore frightened of performing publicly, is regularly called upon to read aloud in front of the teacher and other students. The child freezes up and can’t read, or stumbles terribly, and the embarrassment and shame intensify. In the other, a child for whom, for whatever reason, reading is more difficult than it is for other kids, stumbles while reading, feels shamed and embarrassed, and, through repeated such experiences develops a fear and loathing of reading, which then becomes the real cause of what is later diagnosed as dyslexia.

In either case, you can see how being forced to read in a socially pressured situation can result in high anxiety about reading and a mental set, or mental block, which leads the child to conclude, consciously or unconsciously, that reading is outside of his or her realm of possibility. In either case, the long-lasting cause of what gets called “dyslexia” is a mental block, which may manifest as fear, anger, or shame, or all of these, which prevents the child from useful engagement with reading. Only the passage of time with no pressure, no judgment, coupled maybe with the joy and comfort of being read to, can remove the block.

Concluding thoughts

As a society we are extraordinary reluctant to consider the idea that schools are a major cause of pathology in our children. I have written elsewhere (e.g. here) about the overwhelming evidence that school pressure is the main cause of the rise of anxiety and depression among school-aged kids, especially since the advent of Common Core, yet most people would prefer to attribute that rise to smartphones and social media. I have also provided evidence (e.g. here) that ADHD, for most kids who get the diagnosis, is a school-related problem. And now I suggest that dyslexia is too.

And now, what do you think about all this, or what questions might you have? This Substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your thoughts and questions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. Readers’ thoughtful comments and questions add to the value of these letters for everyone.

With respect and best wishes,

Peter

NOTE ADDED NOV. 3, 2024. I now have posted a follow-up letter, which may help clarify some of what I wrote here. Here is the link:

https://petergray.substack.com/p/96-dyslexia-is-a-catch-all-diagnosis

Note: Portions of this essay are taken from previous blog essays and substack letters I have posted.