Peter Hitchens: Dyslexia does not exist. It is an invented affliction which has become an industry of several million pounds around children who have not learned to read

Who will break it in Jamie Oliver that dyslexia probably does not exist? And when they do, will the famous cook will be delighted that he was finally released from the burden of this legendary complaint? Or will it be crossed?

I guess guess. Because dyslexia is one of those rare afflictions that people really want to have. In this, it's like his equally fictitious cousin ADHD. The two do not have a objective, testable and falsifiable diagnosis. However, the two bring certain privileges to those who think they have them.

The recipients of the allocation of disabled students can receive additional time to pass exams, a scribe, a reader, assistance software or modified exam documents. Sometimes there are cheap or even free laptops with support for the support of the support spelling.

ADHD and dyslexia can qualify parents of children diagnosed with them for unjustly taxed well-being services that are not tested in means. ADHD gives you prescriptions for the NHS for stimulants, remarkably similar to illegal amphetamines, for which there is a substantial black market among the healthy unquestionably. I am happy to say that so far, there is no pill specifically for dyslexia. The two raise a burden of responsibility of the victim, his parents and especially the schools in which they go.

It is also an industry of several million pounds. And those who dare to criticize it can expect a lot of screams of rage. Consequently, almost universal praise has relied on people like Jamie Oliver who identify as patients with dyslexia.

Mr. Oliver obtained the enormous privilege of making a television documentary on dyslexia, to be broadcast on Channel 4 later this year. How courageous! Or is it? Who is the besieged minority here? The believers of dyslexia, or those who doubt its existence?

Mr. Oliver explained yesterday on the BBC that even if he was very happy at school, he could not read, write or spell, and fought so much. He obtained two GCSE. I was fleeing words, reading and writing. I thought it was just me. But we were hundreds of thousands each year.

He said that self -esteem and self -esteem of many children like him had evaporated under the age of ten. And I believe it. If you can't read, school is a misery. But the explanation is not dyslexia. How could it be? No one can even get along exactly what it is.

Jamie Oliver revealed that he had had a hard time at school because he couldn't read, write or spell. He obtained two GCSE

All those who cannot read correctly are affected in different ways by this lack. But the method invited to overcome it is roughly the same as the method invited by traditional reading teachers in the ages. This is called synthetic phonetics (SP), in which children learn to associate a particular sound with each letter. I was taught in this way by my mother, who was taught by her mother and simply transmitted the gift to me. I still remember the afternoon in an attic on the edge of Dartmoor, four years old, when I finally came across literacy, reading the words they meant in an ancient annual Tiger Tim from the 1930s, which she had used as an educational aid.

It was the word that told me that held me. Once I won the E and have it together, nothing could stop me.

A teacher from London, the Hungarian Eva Retkin, argued for years that she could teach any child to read if he knew the alphabet. Beginning to do so by a national newspaper, she held her promise. At the age of 80, long after retirement, she always did it and said that I had still about 30 students in my class and therefore I suppose that some of them were dyslexic, if that is what you want to call it, but that made no difference. They all learned to read before going to high school. Each of them.

This is not surprising for conservative reading experts. Ten years ago, the debate on dyslexia was published. This is a rigorous study of this alleged assertion by two eminent university professors Julian Elliott from the University of Durham and Professor Elena Grigorenko of the University of Yale. They made several points. There is no clear definition or objective diagnosis. No one can agree on the number of people suffer from it. However, you barely know that such a book existed, judging by the way in which the dominant current of our society continues to speak and write dyslexia as if it were an established fact.

Elliott and Grigorenko are not alone. The parliaments select the Science and Technology Committee declared in 2009: there is no convincing evidence that, if a child with dyslexia is not labeled as dyslexic, but receives total support for his reading difficulty, that the child will do worse than a child dyslexic and then receives special help. Indeed, the two receive exactly the same treatment. But as Elliott and Grigorenko say: being dyslexic labeled can be perceived as desirable for many reasons. These include additional resources and additional time in exams which are now so common.

Chef TV makes a documentary on dyslexia, which should be displayed on Channel 4 later this year

But there is then hope that this will reduce shame and embarrassment which are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. This can help relax the child, parents and teachers from any sense of responsibility perceived. And it's true. This is why anyone who doubts the existence of dyslexia can expect abuse rather than a motivated response, precisely because the diagnosis frees all the people involved in all blame. But children should never be blamed. It is not their fault. The fault is elsewhere.

While the American author Rudolf Flesch (an Austrian refugee from Hitler) wrote 70 years ago in his successful book why Johnny Can't Read, the problem is very old in the United States and Great Britain. It is almost entirely due to the use of new erroneous methods of reading teaching (mainly a look).

During the 1930s and 1940s, the idea that children would learn to read better by recognizing whole words with progressive teachers and began to move traditional methods. The Fleschs argument, for the immediate resumption of teaching by phonetics, was widely ignored by the teaching profession in Britain until very recently.

But in 2005, undeniable research in the Clackmannanshire in Scotland made it impossible to ignore it. The seven -year study showed (as Retkin and Flesch could have told them) that SP was very effective in teaching children to read.

Do most British schools now use SP as they are supposed to do by law in England? How can we really know? Bringing teachers to do what they don't want to do is much more difficult than raising cats, and I suspect that many of them consider SP as an authoritarian or something like.

What is certain is that many progressive teachers (and it is many teachers) always see SP with suspicion. A recent article in academics Charlotte Hacking and Dominic Wise Attacks SP, saying that a rigid approach to the teaching of phonetics is without joy and fails children.

I suspect that we still have a lot of dyslexia to come, before Johnny could reread without problem.