Technology-induced Learning Disability
Our society is in the grips of a technology-induced learning
disability that very few people know exists and far fewer understand.
Over 90 million adults are afflicted. 60% of our children are
struggling with it. It is estimated to cost our economy over $220
billion dollars a year.
For the most part it's a developmental learning disability that,
though misdiagnosed as a 'deficit' in children, is in fact, a
neurological infection contracted through the use of a common
technology. The mechanism of infection is similar to the replication
process of a computer virus. When children attempt to use the
infected technology, its code insidiously informs the structure of
their brains and affects the quality of their neurological
functioning. It targets areas of the brain that process the
interface between visual and auditory functions and that involve
memory, language, thought and emotion. Among other symptoms, it
produces erratic 'stutters' in the flow of the child's attention.
Because the adults around them don't understand it, children are
forced to suffer its painful and disabling affects alone. Typically,
if they don't get through it within a few years of exposure, the
result is a life- diminishing, life-sentence. Because they are alone
and don't understand it, children blame themselves for the
intellectual and psychological disabilities it causes them. Many of
the afflicted become ashamed of their own minds. They become prone to
forming debilitating intellectual and emotional self-assumptions.
What am I talking about? You just used it. You are using it right
now. Since you began reading the paragraphs above your mind has used
the technology I am talking about to perform tens of thousands of
mental operations. The technology I am speaking about is the 'code'
we use to 'decode' written words – the code we use to read with.
This code is so pervasive and so taken for granted that its
neurological affects have been almost completely overlooked. Our
reading research community all but ignores it. Yet, this code is an
archaic man-made technology. It requires the brain to conform to it.
Learning it often requires years of unnatural mental frustration. A
failure to learn it well will intellectually and emotionally warp a
child's life.
I know it's hard to believe. You are probably one of the fortunate
to have escaped the disability, but nothing I have said is
exaggerated. I am asking you to consider that the root cause of the
intellectual, emotional and economic suffering of illiteracy is the
code itself. Beyond, illiteracy, I am asking you to consider that
our children's educational performance and how they feel about
themselves in relation to their performance, is seriously affected by
the intellectual self-assumptions that form as they struggle with
this code. Give me a little more of your attention and I will prove
it. I am not trying to sell anything. This issue needs your
attention.
please continue on at
http://www.implicity.org/reading/Letters/eddec2001.htm
Send your comments on the above to: renae@catlover.com