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Wednesday 14 January 2009

MP ignorant, offensive

MP brands dyslexia a 'fiction'

I accept that Graham Stringer MP has the best interests of children at heart, and wants to improve standards of education by introducing a system of synthetic phonics, something that has show promise in trials in Scotland. I'm all for that.

But to do this by attacking dyslexia as nothing but a myth is misinformed, misguided, and wrong. There have been studies conducted using FMRI which apparently show clear evidence of differences in physiology (referenced here); the evidence is not yet incontrovertible, by any means, but it is far from being a myth.

Mr Stringer needs to shut the hell up and listen to the evidence before shooting his mouth off and dismissing a troubling condition which affects millions of people. There are better ways to promote more efficient teaching methods - the trials speak for themselves in this regard. If there are funding issues, you can't just call a costly condition a myth and divert its section of the budget. Yes it's a simple solution to a complex problem, but that's not always what we need. In fact, it's quite rare that that would suffice.

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