This week we read about two abnormalities in human cognition. The first was Dyslexia, which is a general term for a set of reading disorders, in a chapter of Dehaene's Reading in the Brain. The other is Autism and this is a disorder of varying degrees of both social and cognitive disability. While they have different causes, we assume since we do not know the causes of either, both disorders have similar outcomes when it comes to reading, they have problems with the comprehension of literature. In the case of Autism, many of those affected cannot grasp two key concepts needed for healthy social growth. These two concepts are fictionalization, the ability to create a spatial or metaphorical nonexistence, and theory of mind, the ability to predict anothers actions and thoughts through gestures and speech patterns. Dyslexia, on the other hand, deals with the construction of words themselves. This can be a trouble in phonetic sound memorization and/or visual recognition of letters due to word density. But one question that comes along is this, "Why do we care?"
This question is a serious one and with a little education one can learn the answer. If one were to look at the number diagnosed, then they would have the short answer: a lot of people are affected by these disorders. 1 out of every 88 children are diagnosed with Autism and many other children are diagnosed with dyslexia in varying degrees, numbers cannot be tallied because of lack of a set diagnosis criteria. This means that a large amount of the population have a problem with literature and thus education. If in fact this large amount of children cannot understand literature, then this same population will have trouble understanding other key concepts and relations made both in academic and social education. It is then our duty to dedicate perhaps a new style of teaching one that could thwart such inability and perhaps let those who have no disorder to learn easier and be able to interact just as well with those who do.
No comments:
Post a Comment