Not been keeping up with reviewing what I have read...
Read the first section on history of writing. She keeps repeating the tendentious argument that Not been keeping up with reviewing what I have read...
Read the first section on history of writing. She keeps repeating the tendentious argument that reading comprehension is being undermined by the internet and other visual media (probably she means TV). I can't see that supported by any evidence. She labours the argument of Socrates that writing has reduced the training of memory (sounds like the loathsome Mr Gove) but writing does not preclude memorisation and this is not true in all cultures; Tibetan monks have written texts but spend hours memorising them. I also find the repetition irritating; it suggests that she feels I won't remember what she has said unless she repeats it all the time. This is an infuriating trait of science television programmes, which suggests that her own writing (and hence my reading) is influenced for the worse by multi-media. Is this subtle support for her argument of the "Aaargh it's got me too" variety or just poor editing? In the edition I have, there are no superscripts in the body of the text to indicate a note or reference (and the notes in the back just have page references)- bah!
I found the reading/writing history section of the book (about the first third) very interesting. The neurology is rather sketchy. I would have liked more of that, but I think that is not the author's specialism. The last third, about practice in schools I find most problematic but probably because of my strong antipathy to schools. She discusses common patterns of damage inflicted by schools on dyslexics and then extols the great careers many dyslexics have had in unexpected careers. If school becomes meaningless for you and you fight the impact of their negative assessment on your personality and survive, then that is probably a great training for surviving elsewhere. My response to that is that it ignores the marginalised majority of dyslexics. And just as schools punish the non-typical, there is also a burden of conformity on the neurotypical.
For skilled neurotypical readers, letters synaesthesically become sounds without problems and those sounds are delivered fast enough to convey meaning. For centuries that was the only way to do things. I suspect that very soon the quality of the software that can speak text and turn text into speech will obviate the requirement for high level reading skill to access information. There may also be better ways of storing information in a 3D information space than in the relentlessly linear book. In 20 years there will probably be very little new text printed on paper (unless you are a traditionalist) and all that scanned text in Google books will be machine readable too (for a fee...). Just as the preoccupation of deaf schools used to be lip reading and speaking to fit in with the wider world, to the exclusion of any real learning, I expect schools to fight the notion that people might educate themselves with very little (or no) conventional reading. Once the link between reading and learning is broken, it would be no longer critical to be able to read by a certain age. Just as the brain never adapted to read, there could be new ways of learning that could favour the strengths of dyslexics (eg. visuo-spatial awareness) rather than relentlessly punish their weaknesses. ...more
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