The book is called “Dyslexia and the Journalist: Battling a Silent Disability.” It’s by Tony Silvia and Suzanne Arena. Silvia is a journalism professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, and also was chair of the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Journalism. He says awareness of dyslexia has progressed somewhat over the years, but the condition is still misunderstood, misdiagnosed or undiagnosed, and this lack of awareness remains a serious obstacle for young children with dyslexia, who are mistakenly thought to be slow, or lazy, or just not very smart.
Tony Silvia: One of the reasons we did this book was to show that there are people who you think you know in public life, who are excellent communicators by anybody’s standard, and no one would think they’re dyslexic. … Fred Friendly – who has Rhode Island roots, who’s part of the book – Fred Friendly went to a so-called expert who suggested that his problem was he couldn’t see well. And there was also a suggestion that it could be that his problem involved, let’s say, adolescent self-stimulation, and that could have been causing his disorder, so to speak. So I don’t know that today we approach that level of misunderstanding, but there is still a lot of misunderstanding.
Chuck Hinman: So what exactly is dyslexia? Many of us still might think, “oh yeah, that’s when people read things backwards.” That’s not it. Suzanne Arena, with Decoding Dyslexia Rhode Island, is dyslexic and has a dyslexic son, as well. She says it’s much more complicated.
Suzanne Arena: Dyslexia, first of all, is not just one thing. It’s a combination of things, but it has to do with comprehension, it has to do with phonics, a bunch of different things in this formula. Nobody’s all the same, you can’t just box children and say they’re grouped a certain way. Everybody’s slightly different. It’s a processing disorder. So, we look at words – I might take the first letter and go three letters in. To give you an example: girl. I would spell that g-r-l, forgetting some of the other vowels, and that sort of thing. Some children, it’s the comprehension of listening. “You weren’t listening, you’re lazy, or you’re not paying attention.”
Silvia: I think one of the big differences with dyslexia is that, we call it the hidden disability. Because most other disabilities – if I can’t see, if I’m vision impaired, that’s pretty obvious to anybody around me. If I can’t hear, similarly. If I can’t walk, similarly. But what does dyslexia look like when you meet someone? … Byron Pitts, who now does Nightline for ABC, has achieved at the highest levels of journalism. … When he first went to work for 60 Minutes, he divulged or disclosed to one of his colleagues that he was dyslexic. And the comment was, “funny, you don’t look dyslexic.” And he said, “well, what does a dyslexic look like?” So diagnosis is difficult because it is invisible for the most part.
Hinman: Suzanne Arena says there are tests that can be done to diagnose dyslexia, and legislation has been passed, going back to the mid-70s at the federal level, and recently in Rhode Island as well, with the Right to Read Act, to get schools to implement those tests, with mixed success.
Arena: I think it was in 1974, there was a bill passed called the Child Find Mandate. Under that mandate, schools are obligated to look for children that actually have some learning challenge, that could have a learning disability. You’d be hard pressed to find any teacher, any school that has ever done this, and they keep no statistics. And so, what parents typically do is, they push the schools to do an educational evaluation. So what they would do is, do an assessment going into first grade, and our legislation that we did, the Right to Read, was supposed to be that you would get an assessment of all children going in. We’re not doing it yet, we’re working towards it. But what typically parents do is, they go outside and they spend thousands of dollars privately if you have money, or you take it out of your 401K, and you test your child.
Hinman: That illustrates what Tony Silvia calls the “dyslexia divide” that separates those with the means to take on the fight for their kids from those without. It’s a point made by the stories in the book, of the successes of those prominent journalists, including Anderson Cooper and Richard Engel.
Silvia: There is a socioeconomic issue here. For instance, almost everybody in the book came from a very privileged background, with parents who had money, to put it directly. I mean, Anderson Cooper is from the Vanderbilt family, and Richard Engel’s family is in banking. So they all freely admit that a lot of the good that probably happened to them, had a lot to do with having the means to go to the schools, to get the help. And so there’s that huge divide.
Hinman: In the end, say Silvia and Arena, that divide can only be bridged by social and governmental action brought about by increased awareness of the actual reality of dyslexia.
Silvia: We hope that by kind of fighting a stereotype – that it’s only “these kinds of people” who are dyslexic – that’s the kind of awareness that I think we intended. It’s inspirational to read these people’s stories. But beyond inspiration – which is a wonderful thing of great value – when the inspiration is done, there should be left awareness. And that’s what we hoped to bring about with this book.
Hinman: The book is “Dyslexia and the Journalist: Battling a Silent Disability.” I’ve been talking with the authors, Tony Silvia and Suzanne Arena.
