DYSLEXIA AND INCLUSIVE EDUCATION

Abstract

It is estimated that, in Brazil, about 15 million people have some type of special need. Special needs can be of different types: mental, hearing, visual, physical, behavioral or multiple disabilities. From this universe, it is believed that at least ninety percent of children in basic education suffer from some type of language-related learning difficulty: dyslexia, dysgraphia and dysorthography. Among them, dyslexia is the one with the highest incidence and deserves full attention from educational policy managers, especially that of special education. Dyslexia is the partial incapacity of the child to read understanding what is read, despite normal intelligence, normal hearing or vision and coming from suitable homes, that is, that do not experience domestic or cultural deprivation. We find dyslexics in rich and poor families. While rich families can take their child to a psychologist, neurologist or psychopedagogist, a child from a poor family, studying in a public school, tends to assert the difficulty persisting with language disorders in adulthood. Perhaps, for this reason, that is, as a matter of social class, dyslexia is a disease of the middle class, precisely because, early on, parents manage to diagnose the difficulty and start with medical and psychopedagogical interventions.In the context of educational institutions, reports from teachers register situations in which children, apparently bright and very intelligent, cannot read, write or have good spelling for their age. In college entrance exams, executive committees describe "bizarre" (sometimes a laughingstock) cases in which candidates have low reading comprehension or spelling is still phonetic (speech-based) and fickle.