A Knoxville, TN homeschooling father of two e-mailed to open a conversation about learning disability. In a Washington Post article, I wrote, “I’ve never heard a home-schooling parent refer to a child as “learning disabled,” for instance. There are many kinds of intelligence, but conventional schools usually only focus on one.”
The homeschooling dad said:
I would only take exception to your comments on children with a learning disability. I doubt that learning disabilities can always be chalked-up to a different way of learning, which your article implies. Left-handed people, for instance, are not right-handed disabled. They’re bodies and brains simply work differently, not wrongly. But, a child without a thumb, or with a thumb that does not function, is not one whose body and brain works differently. This constitutes a genuine privation. Certainly the child can be taught skills and given the kind of assistance he or she needs to overcome the disability and function well and excel.
When I read that email, one name sprung to mind: Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown. As Aman Verjee of Baseball-Statistics.com tells the story:
When he was seven years old, Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown lost the tip of his index finger in his uncle’s corn shredder. A few weeks later he broke his third and fourth fingers while chasing a hog (no rest for the weary, I suppose), and they healed into a gnarled, unnatural shape. Despite his handicap, Brown became a semipro infielder. One day, the team’s star pitcher broke his arm and Brown took over; in five innings, he struck out fourteen, using a devastating curve ball that broke unusually because of the shape of his hand. Brown became a big league pitcher, and was perhaps the National League’s premier hurler between 1905 and 1910. His 1906 season may be the best ever, and he still has the third-lowest career ERA of all time.
Brown’s “disability” seems to have been an important part of his success. That may also be the case with guitarist Django Reinhardt, who learned guitar after a fire severely damaged the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand.
Django was bedridden for eighteen months. During this time he was given a guitar, and with great determination Django created a whole new fingering system built around the two fingers on his left hand that had full mobility.
Which raises the question, what is a learning disability, really?
“Disability” always depends on context. So does “intelligence”. Howard Gardner, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, developed the theory of multiple intelligences, and has also advocated individual-centered education. (There’s a good, basic explanation of the theory in the FAQ page of Professor Gardner’s website.) Because homeschooling can adapt the context to fit the child, rather than forcing the child to fit the context (or fail), it seems to offer a hope of finding the “ability” in “disability”.
This isn’t to minimize the difficulty of the task. Children who can’t speak, or hear, or sit still, or control arms or legs, or who have other challenges often labeled as disabilities need kinds of help that other children may not need. On the other hand, it’s possible that they may have something to offer that other children may not have. We’d welcome comments on this topic from people with experience homeschooling in these situations. What have you discovered?
1 response so far ↓
1 Beth G-P // Jun 6, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I am a homeschooling parent. My son 9yo has struggled to learn to read. It has always been clear to me that there was some disconnect in his ability to see the letters and translate those to phonetic sounds. If asked he would know the phonetic sounds of letters, but seeing the written letter, he was unable to have the same facility. So, of course, we adapted to whole word learning, as opposed to phonics based learning. He reads, it was just a longer road.
Recently, at a dinner party, a friend was relating her child’s recently diagnosed Learning Disability, which has qualified her son for extra help and and IEP. Interestingly, her son was diagnosed with the same identical issue I described with my own son!
My thought was the same as the yours, of course this would be a huge disability in classroom that was teaching phonics and would require outside assistance in other methods.
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