Dyslexia - judging today by the past
Having talked publicly about my difficult academic journey, due to my dyslexia, I was asked in a recent interview what I would want to say to pupils and teachers now. This made me think; time can be enlightening in many ways, but there is always a difficulty in looking back and judging people on today’s knowledge and insight. I have a major issue with judging people on the past by today’s standards, because that’s what evolution is, that’s what progress is about. We don’t have a stagnant life cycle. There are always learnings along the way.
It’s hard to chastise the people who at the time didn’t have the information, didn’t have the training, and didn’t have the same awareness of certain issues to the extent that we do today.
Crucially that point can be applied more broadly to across our whole society, It frustrates me to be perfectly honest, because it’s good that we progress, it’s good that we learnt from our mistakes, it’s good that things we did in the past aren’t right now, and we can do them so much better now.
It’s good that we are progressing and reflecting on the words and actions that were thought to be acceptable 40, 50, 60 years ago and are now, quite rightly, not in the vocab of the youngsters coming through. Whereas for people my age, those words and actions are still in our vocabulary because we lived through it. I’m a great one to look forward to the future and it’s marvellous that my children and grandchildren don’t even have some of those words in their vocabulary. It’s not something that would come to mind at all, or be used in their vocabulary, innocently or otherwise
It’s something society is doing badly in my view at the moment, but we’ve got to stop beating ourselves up about our past and look forward to the future. Let’s keep progressing but also rejoice in the knowledge that we’ve got and how far we’ve come !
Even though my dyslexia wasn’t revealed until much later in my life, there was a relief teacher, Mr Priddle, spotted that I wasn’t thick but instead I was struggling in certain areas and took the time to help. He gave me the tools to work to my agenda which were very different to the conventional ones that I was struggling with.
For me, I’m not going to criticise or hold a grudge against my teachers for not picking up on my dyslexia, because they didn’t have the awareness back then, or the tools to work positively with it, as we do now. We must keep learning and it’s a positive thing that we’re moving forward, but let’s remember - the past is a small section of our journey to the present and into a much more informed future.