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(Boulton) For children that are less than proficient at reading given the enormous social pressure context on it
they're not .. they ...
the only way they can feel good about it -- about not being proficient -- is if they're one of
the rare ones that have .. that are
emerging in art or
sports or
music or they found some other way to feel good about themselves. Like reading doesn't matter.
You see that little kids, like you were saying, We talk to little children who are
struggling with reading
And it's not important. They say reading's not important.
or
I'm stupid. Or
I just can't read that well. (Dr. Grandin) That's right.
(Boulton) There's various ways
of formulating
an off-putting, protective
membrane against how they'd feel if they thought it really was was vital and important.
(Dr. Grandin) Right. Yeah, all different coping mechanisms to handle ... (Boulton) And those coping mechanisms aren't healthy.
(Dr. Grandin) No, not particularly. Well, not in all respects. (Boulton) OK. Alright.
(Dr. Grandin) But but they're probably uh
helpful in
I mean,
They're adaptive responses
um um
They're probably not going to be useful
in terms of helping you overcome your skill deficit. But they're going to help you momentarily
cope with the way you feel.
And human beings are fairly
um
well programmed to to be very responsive to immediate needs. And, you know ...
We usually think a lot more about how we're feeling right now
than about
how proficient we're going to be five or six years from now.
(Bolton) For most of our evolution there wasn't anything but now.
(Dr. Grandin) That's right. Now is a very critical and important moment for us. So you see these adaptive things,
and it's not as though they're
uh you know they're they're awful things that that that have been happening.
(Boulton) I understand that they're organismically
intelligent adaptive strategies for dealing with this overwhelming feeling
and they're short-circuiting learning.
(Dr. Grandin) That's right. There's no doubt about that.
There's no doubt that that you know that the attitudes and the affects surrounding
school instruction,
reading, texts,
and all of those things
um
are very maladaptive
for kids that began to experience
different levels of reading failure.
(Boulton) So, my point is that when we look at this as a whole ... if we step back and look at the nation as
a whole and all the children coming through
the uh recurring
corroborative research
on adult literacy problems .. It used to be that the National Institute for Literacy
comes out ninety two million .. and everbody thinks that's got to be nuts. (Dr. Grandin) Right.
(Boulton) But subsequently the American Medical Association, Justice Department studies, study after study comes back
to say, no, that looks pretty close to the mark and may be bigger than that. Right?
(Dr Grandin) Pretty frightening.
(Boulton) So a third of the adult population is reading below the fifth grade level
and engaging in ... the correlation is seventy percent on average in prison and health problems
across the board
correlates with reading. (Dr. Grandin) It's an enormous impact.
(Boulton) So, with nearly half a trillion dollars in expenses associated with it
then we've got these children coming through school which we're saying most of them are less than proficient.
And we know that it's got psychological consequences and we know that it connects to the $92 million.
And you know
all of this comes down to
the process of learning to read for those people
is creating
a learning disability. (Dr. Grandin) That's right.
(Boulton) I mean, the greatest learning disability in this country is the process of learning to read.
(Dr. Grandin) Well, that's probably reasonably accurate. Right. I mean, I think there
we need to make a distinction between
the the folks that you've identified on those national assessments that are
less than proficient
and the students that the public schools formally identify as learning disabled.
(Boulton) Yes, I don't mean the neurobiological distinction that congress has put forth in order to limit (Dr. Grandin) Right ....
(Boulton) its liability exposure to spending money and so forth (Dr Grandin) That's right. (Boulton) But if you talk about it generally
If you look up learning disability in
the general dictionary and not in the congressional definition for funding allocations,
as this short circuited the disabled-ness
with respect to learning in certain domains or what have you
the biggest most common
disability with respect to our capacity for learning in our society is the process of
learning to read. (Dr. Grandin) Yeah, no doubt about it.
(Dr. Grandin) And if you don't read proficiently your learning is disabled
To varying degrees.