Dyslexia and Learned Helplessness

#Dyslexics often struggle at school, and we usually put this down to their #dyslexia. But the truth is that if #education is difficult for them in their formative years, they become habituated into the unconscious behaviours of failure, so that they'll be highly likely to fail - even at thngs that they can do!

In the 1960s, American psychologist Martin Seligman showed that subjects can effectively be "taught to fail". When faced with stressful or disproportionately difficult tasks, they "learn" that they're helpless, and cannot succeed. And this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: they become helpless, they fail, and this helpless failure leads to further feelings of inadequacy.

In a system that's structured to disadvantage dyslexics, it's hardly surprising that as they go through school, they become habituated into failure.
And perhaps it's not their dyslexia that causes this.
Perhaps it's us.

[lumirose]

Great little video, and applicable in so many areas of life. Thought provoking stuff.

[ralphsnyder]

When I was a child I hated the story of The Little Engine That Could. As an adult I still hated it. So much so that I wrote The Big Engine That Couldn't and clearly blamed the engineer who wanted the engine to do something impossible. This video seems a little le that.