A recent UK green paper about learning difficulties states they have reached a staggering 20%. The paper identifies “we are letting our children down” and looks to restructure services, but does not seem to fundamentally change the content of our approach. It also indicates that there are many more people undiagnosed for one reason or another (disclosure, not wanting to be labelled, ignorance, etc). They are caught in the confusion trap mentioned earlier with excessive amounts of stress for the them, their family and their educational establishment.
According to Sir Ken Robinson,[i] creativity is about thinking of lots of ways to interpret a question, thinking of several possible answers, thinking laterally and coming up with multiple answers, not one. From his research on genius levels of divergent thinking, at 4 years old this measured 98% and as they grew up their scores dropped – confirmation that creativity is being suppressed. Those with many learning difficulties seem to have unbounded creativity.
[i] Sir Ken Robinson, The Changing Educational Paradigms, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Olivehickmott 