When you think of what it means to be smart, what comes to mind? For me, this image started to form early on in life. It meant getting high grades, going to Russell group universities, reading lots of books and being politically engaged. All things that I was not.
As a society, our perception of intelligence is framed through a biased, homogenised lens. We see reading books as intellectually superior to audio books, and engaging with The Economist as time better spent than watching documentaries. The way we moralise thinking and learning breeds a culture of shame for many, but it is particularly acute for the near 15% of the population who have ‘learning difficulties’ (of which diagnoses include ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia and Dyscalculia).
I’m Dyslexic, and I’ve carried a weight of shame around the way my brain works for most of my life. Yet over the past few years I’ve learnt that what I’ve achieved isn’t in spite of my Dyslexia, it’s because of it. I’ve learnt that I’m not dumb, I’m different.
This belief is the cornerstone of neurodiversity – a frontier of the diversity and inclusion conversation – which seeks to open our minds to the diverse ways people think. Reframing learning difficulties from a source of shame, into a source of power – for all of society.
Dyslexia is a language processing difficulty that is often seen in reading, writing and spelling. A common struggle for people with dyslexia is messing up ‘their, there and they’re’, which people seem to be dumbfounded that anyone ‘educated’ could possibly do. Less understood is how Dyslexia changes how you process the entire world around you, often affecting things like memory and organisation.
As for many people with learning difficulties, school was a traumatic experience. In a system where your worth is ranked by grading and creativity is seen as a hobby, as quickly as I was taught what it meant to be smart, I learnt I was not. People say that if you were to design a system to remove someone’s self confidence, you’d come up with school – as a long term member of set 7/7, I wholeheartedly agree.