It is horrifying that the kind of blinkered prejudice against individuals with specific learning disabilities expressed by sociologist Frank Furedi ("Examiners buckle under an avalanche of excuses", THES, October 16) can still be found in the academic community. Specific learning disabilities may not be readily detectable but they are nonetheless real.
Recent decades have seen major advances in the scientific understanding of the aetiology and nature of several developmental pathologies that result in highly specific impairments in learning. Take dyslexia. This disability probably has a genetic origin, and is three times more common in males than in females and much higher in children with close family members who also encountered difficulties in acquiring literacy. The core deficit is in the processing of speech and language, but it is manifested most clearly in literacy acquisition, when the child has to map his or her weak mental representations of the units of spoken language on to a system of arbitrary visual symbols.
What Furedi really believes, of course, is that individuals identified by psychologists as having specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia are either plain lazy or of such low intellectual calibre that we should not encourage their admission to university. He could not be more wrong. To gain the qualifications to persuade university admissions tutors to give them even a second thought, dyslexic students have to overcome massive personal hurdles in reading and writing. This is typically achieved by huge amounts of hard work and endurance, and by compensating for their basic language-processing difficulties through inventive use of strategies capitalising on intellectual strengths. Indeed, it is these intellectual strengths that really make the case for improving access so undeniable. The average dyslexic person who manages to gain admission to university has extremely high levels of intelligence, particularly when assessed in nonverbal reasoning, which is believed to provide the purest indicators of capacity for learning.
Most students with specific learning disabilities place few special demands on their universities. As teachers, we could do much more for these individuals at relatively low cost in terms of our own time. When we deny these students a proper education, we are depriving the next generation of brilliant young people with the skills and knowledge commensurate with their potential.
Susan Gathercole Professor of psychology University of Bristol