Dyslexia Debate: An Academic and Legal Rabbit Hole

Dyslexia is a widely recognized learning disorder that affects a person’s ability to read but the use of the term has increasingly become a subject of debate among academics, especially in the United Kingdom. 

Since its discovery by German Professor Rudolf Berlin over 130 years ago, the concept of dyslexia has reached mainstream recognition. Young people who pronounce a word incorrectly might joke that they are dyslexic, whether or not they have an actual diagnosis. Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a best-selling book series by Rick Riordan with a Disney+ adaptation on the way, features several characters diagnosed with the condition. Popular BookTube vloggers Daniel Greene and Merphy Napier (463K and 379K subscribers respectively) have been open online about their experiences with dyslexia. 

The Debate

Dyslexia’s secure place in popular culture is no surprise considering that it affects one in five children. 

So why would a reputable journal like the Oxford Review of Education publish a paper which describes the term as “problematic”? Additionally, the paper in question, “The dyslexia debate: life without the label,” published in 2020 and written by Simon Gibbs and Julian Elliot is not the only or even the first of its kind. In fact, Elliot, a professor at the University of Durham in the UK, has co-authored at least two books on the subject, one in 2014 and another in 2016. 

In the same August 2020 volume of the Oxford Review of Education, Phillip Kirby of St John’s College writes, “queries about the term’s efficacy have marked dyslexia’s history since it was first identified in the 1870s.”

The trouble seems to come from how dyslexia is defined and diagnosed. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a condition affecting the brain that causes difficulty in reading and spelling, for example, but does not affect intelligence.” 

Elliot and Gibbs refer to more “inclusive” definitions of the term which see dyslexia simply as “the lower end of a continuum of reading performance.” They criticize the intelligence “discrepancy model” because it excludes people with severe intellectual difficulties. For this reason, Elliot and Gibbs advocate for retiring the term dyslexia altogether since its old formulation is exclusionary and the continuum model is indistinguishable from poor reading skills in general. 

The Law

However, as Kirby points out, dyslexia’s definition debate is not unique to the term. Other learning disabilities like ADHD and psychological conditions like Depression are similarly vaguely defined. The semantics of any given word can be argued ad nauseam.

So why is the dyslexia debate itself seeping into the mainstream? Why did Guardian Journalist Sirin Kale feel the need to write over 6300 words on the subject in September 2020?

Well, the debate begins and ends with the legal definition. 

In the United Kingdom where Kirby and Elliot live and work, dyslexia policy is a battle. In 2018, two local authorities in the country stopped differentiating between dyslexia and literacy difficulties. This decision received massive pushback from families and politicians alike. 

In the United States

In the same year that the UK dyslexia debate became legally contentious, United States Federal law continued to use a traditional definition. 

The First Step Act of 2018 defines dyslexia at the federal level as: “an unexpected difficulty in reading for an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader, most commonly caused by a difficulty in the phonological processing (the appreciation of the individual sounds of spoken language), which affects the ability of an individual to speak, read, and spell.”

By tying the definition of dyslexia to otherwise normal intelligence, federal law seems to imply the discrepancy model. This means that in the US, when advocates push for policies that protect those with dyslexia, they are in danger of excluding those with intellectual difficulties. It begs the question: if dyslexia has nothing to do with intelligence, why include it at all in the discussion?

Time will tell if a battle like that in the UK emerges in the US. For the time being, however, American academia seems content with the establishment. “Dyslexia in the 21st century,” a 2021 paper published in Current Opinion on Psychiatry, praises the First Step Act as “an extremely important law.”