Learning Disabilities: We All Pay

Years ago, while still a physician in training, I worked with a 13-year-old girl who volunteered to help us canvass an inner-city neighborhood for cases of a viral illness causing a local epidemic. She amazed me with her quick perception of epidemiological principles and her perspicacity in figuring out what risk factors were likely to result in catching the virus. Trying to harness her obvious intelligence, I gave her some paperwork to do. It was then that I discovered she was dyslexic. This promising child with a gift for figuring out complex interactions and relationships in her head was falling further and further behind in school because of a learning disability.

Learning disorders and their companion affliction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, need to be dragged out of a closet that has almost nothing else left in it. Kids with these problems are generally of normal intelligence, but some area of their brains just don’t work as fluidly as they should. Maybe they have trouble deciphering the written word. Perhaps they just can’t get the hang of how time works or get bogged down when they’re asked to analyze, sequentialize and punctuate a composition. They may be distracted by every butterfly that flutters past the classroom window, every burp or click out of a fellow student. Put these kids on a farm in the highlands of Guatemala or take them back to the days of knights, when a good strong arm wielding a good strong sword defined one’s value to society, and they’d be champs.

Obviously, these kids are going to feel inadequate if they can’t read a keyboard or follow a newspaper article on the latest Democratic fundraising scandal. But why should their handicaps disturb the larger society? For one thing, they have a tremendous amount of collective potential, which could be channeled around their disorders by using innovative methods of instruction, like letting them take tests and study on tape. For another, absent effective early intervention, they will comprise a large part of the underbelly of society.

Take a third grader named Charlie. Charlie can’t sit still, has yet to make a decent collage and couldn’t, if his life depended on it, distinguish “d” from “b.” But Charlie’s no dummy when it comes to mechanical stuff. The teacher has been told that he’s a handful, and she can’t help but get frustrated by his antics when there are 30 other kids who also need her attention. Charlie knows he’s not behaving up to expectation, but he doesn’t know how to change the situation. So he stops trying, maybe drops out of school as soon as he has the opportunity. He has no skills, so his choices are gang activity (he’ll have friends there), drugs (to self-medicate), welfare (who will hire an untrained dyslexic with ADHD?) or crime. Charlie doesn’t earn a living, so he doesn’t pay taxes. Maybe he’ll even need a billet in a high-tech prison for a few years. But if someone had praised his mechanical ability and bought him books on tape when he was younger, he might now be pulling down a decent income fixing cars.

I’m hardly a fan of welfare, but I do see some difficulties ahead for adults whose unidentified learning disorders may limit employment opportunities when their benefits are terminated. New SSI criteria also jeopardize Medicaid coverage for children with learning disorders and hyperactivity, though they certainly don’t jeopardize the unlimited goodies, from raised potty seats to custom wheelchairs, bestowed on the over-65 crowd courtesy of the taxpayers. Limited resources may need to be distributed more equitably among the generations.

Learning disorders and hyperactivity/attention deficit problems may represent lifelong handicaps, not just to the affected children but to all of us who must shoulder the burden of their nonparticipation in the tasks of society. Perhaps the schools of the future will be able to do profiles on each kindergartener and intervene with educational methods attuned to that child’s learning propensities, be they visual, tactile, auditory or other. We can’t fool kids by telling them they’re doing a great job when they know their accomplishments aren’t up to par. But we can tailor the ways we feed them information so that it gets into their brains in the most convenient way possible. Then each child can have a sense of accomplishment based on reality.

And maybe we won’t have to build quite so many jails.