Their extraordinary talent apart, Nilesh and Jason have one other thing in common: dyslexia. Some wiring in their brain doesn't allow them to read and write the alphabet quite as easily as others do. Often they have a block about numbers and their logic seems very different from ours.
They are also part of the 5-10 per cent of children in the world who have dyslexia and related conditions, collectively understood as learning disorders. This means some 2-3 lakh schoolgoing children in Mumbai or Delhi have a learning disorder. Of these, roughly 75 per cent are boys.
Dyslexics are not slow learners or mentally-challenged. They have average and above average IQs. It's just that they can't absorb things that others take for granted. Theirs is a difficulty in learning how to read and most often combines with dysgraphia and dyscalculia—difficulty in writing and handling numbers. Rarely does one occur without the other two. The disorder is often hereditary or can arise out of post-natal
aberrations like lack of oxygen, convulsions or jaundice. Sometimes the reason can also be emotional. Children from broken families or having violent pasts get dyslexic. Again, a child may have Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) where his inability to focus makes him dyslexic.
Cure there is none. Says Rukshana Sholapurwala, a Mumbai-based special educator: "A person is born a dyslexic and dies one." There is remedy. Remedial education that factors in dyslexic disability can help children come through educational life relatively unscathed. But such education should start as early as possible, says Lena D'Silva, principal, Mona Remedial Education Centre. Even though psychological testing can be done in a six-month-old, children usually come for treatment only when they are about 10 or so.
Trouble is, diagnosing dyslexia is difficult and diagnostic services are few and confined to metros. Parents too can't discern any out-of-the-normal behaviour in their offspring till they reach school. It's only when the child begins the formal and time-bound process of writing in primary classes that parents and teachers might start noticing things amiss. Even so, it escapes adult wisdom that a child could be having serious difficulty understanding that 'Ps' loop to the right, not the left, that 9 and P are mirror images. Most children anyway get confused between "M" and "W" or "9" and "6" till age six and dyslexic tendencies get noticed only thereafter. In fact, if the affliction is mild, it doesn't show up except in indifferent school grades. D'Silva cites the most famous dyslexic example of Albert Einstein, who showed poor grades at school. Regretfully, however, most dyslexic children are dismissed as "dumb", "stupid", "naughty", "inattentive" or, loosely, "hyperactive".
So, it is that children, usually when diagnosed, "are so uncomfortable being themselves that they don't even make eye contact," says Purnima Hindia, programme administrator at the Nalanda Institute, an upmarket, non-profit school for dyslexics. D'Silva says such children are often emotionally battered because of schoolmates making fun of them or teachers being insensitive to their needs.Remedial help hence begins with healing emotional wounds, followed by counselling to make the child believe there is nothing essentially wrong with him and then finding ways and means to study. Dr Madhuri Kulkarni, head of paediatrics at Mumbai's ltmg Hospital, thinks remedial education is most effective along with regular school. Unless the child can't cope with it, it's unfair to make him miss out on regular life.
It doesn't help that dyslexia is not formally recognised by the central or by most state governments. Maharashtra is the only state that recognised it in 1996, 100 years after it was identified worldwide, thanks to the perseverance of the Maharashtra Dyslexia Association (MDA) that has parents as well as medical and education professionals.
Thus the Maharashtra state educational board makes provisions for dyslexics taking their difficulties into account. For instance, they study just one language, are tested for lower level mathematics and their papers are assessed differently. They don't lose marks for spelling errors or improper sequencing of steps in an experiment. "They are tested for knowledge, not memory", says Sholapurwala. Similarly, the ICSE's National Open School allows children to clear school with only six subjects and allows them to take as much time as they want to write a paper. They test for a few subjects and complete the NOs over some years.
"Most critical to the child's success is the family's acceptance," says Lilian Braganza, social worker and mother of a 13-year-old dyslexic. She thinks going to special school helps. Her son, Varun, who barely scraped through till class 5, is now doing well at Nalanda. Hindia explains the difference: in special schools, learning is child- and not syllabus-driven. Learning is at his or her pace, not at the pace dictated by the Board.
But even Mumbai has just a handful of special schools with about 300 seats. But given their special needs, they're expensive: schools in Mumbai charge between Rs 1,000 and Rs 6,000 a month. As for regular schools, despite a government directive, they refuse dyslexics admission. The MDA is handling several court cases filed by distraught parents against such schools. D'Silva has an inexpensive method to educate these children. She holds summer programmes through May. Of the 25 children in a batch, about 10, mostly mild dyslexics, don't have to return to special school.
Much more needs to be done to help dyslexics in India. There is first the task of creating widespread awareness. Then, governments need to understand the issue, make requisite provisions and ensure that schools comply. This isn't easy given the inertia of the educational institutions. Kulkarni and her team hold seminars every year but the turnout of school heads is less than a fifth. The government has yet to crack down on non-complying schools. Besides, parents need more counselling to accept and work at their child than be in denial. As Kulkarni says: "This disorder is a discrepancy between potential and performance." All the potential is what we have to help realise.
