I have written this premeditatedly, you know beforehand, that’s not a good thing to do, to premeditate is to imagine, it is to imagine what will have happened, and you don’t know what’s going to happen.  At least on election night politicians only have to write two speeches, one for winning and one for losing! 

I did a very nice interview on BBC Radio Ulster’s Kintra program with some very nice people.  We talked about “Lock Doon Poyams”, but we also talked about dyslexia and underachievement.  I made a quip, I made a quip that is true, I made a quip that I have spent years thinking about, so here it is, “you get the most dyslexics in prison or art college.”  I’m assuming the quip needs to be explained properly, and I’m assuming that I didn’t do that, and I’m also assuming the quip made it through the editing, that’s a wild lot of assuming. So here goes!

Dyslexia is on a spectrum ranging from mild to severe; a person with dyslexic brain function can have a high or low IQ; the affects of dyslexia will be influenced by other mitigating or exasperating factors; 10% to 15% of the population are somewhere on the dyslexic spectrum; dyslexia is a learning difference with information being computed in the right hemisphere of the brain.

So to the quip, though the proportion of dyslexic people in the general populace is 10-15%, in the prison population it is 30%, with in all “60% of the prison population is said to have difficulty in basic literacy.”  Think about that.  People are not in prison due to poor literacy, but people in prison are vastly more likely to have poor literacy.  My inquisitive brain would love to know where abouts on the dyslexia scale they fall?  What socio-economic background they came from?  What educational interventions took place?  What attitude they had / have to education?  What encouragement or support were they given? 

And now to the second part, 29% of the students at the Royal College of Arts are dyslexic.  There is probably a selection bias going on here, and I mean a selection bias by people, not to people.  If you are creative and imaginative but have struggled with reading and spelling, the arts are an obvious choice.  I’ve never wondered why there are so many dyslexic people at Art College, I’ve only wondered why there aren’t more. 

There is a symmetry to the numbers, both are about 30%, yet one is the loss of liberty, while the other is the cultivation of creative liberty.  They are poles apart yet bound together.  This is what the last part of Scuil Hoose deals with, you struggle through education, only to escape finding yourself lacking what you need to truly escape.  That’s the point of the quip, it sets the arts as the place where dexterous hands are more important, but it could as easily be any of the skilled trades!

An curse’d loas ait clingeth ain

Wi darkest heart boss ask oo thee,

Thon very thing ye deane hae.

Dextrous hands nothin til thee,

Nir wisdom gait ail by yersel

Wi wistful glance ye naw lak back

Yer doom wais fixed sae lang aga!