PART 1  2

  An interesting aspect of learning disabilities is that it is a broad category in the law and because of this there are students who exhibit difficulties with math only, reading only, writing only, or a combination of one or all of these. No two students with learning disabilities presents with the same profile.

    This diversity is due in part to the fact that when Congress was debating passing the first Special Education law (The Education for All Handicapped Act of 1975) there was a serious battle going on between different learning perspectives as to which perspective would get to go into the law and thus have federal funding for research and for services for students that met the specific criteria for that perspective. Some of the big boys in this battled were the language/linguistic proponents and the proponents of perceptual motor deficits.

    When the 11th hour arrived and Congress firmly confirmed they would not include both perspectives in the new law, the camps quickly came to a compromise and agreed on creating the term (and thus the category) of learning disabilities encompassing both perspectives. Although the debate was put to rest, the separate research agendas continue to this day and this is not a bad thing.

    One of the earliest definitions of learning disabilities, developed in 1968 by the National Advisory Committee on Handicapped Children stated:

   "Children with special learning disabilities exhibit a disorder in one or more of the basic, psychological processes involved in understanding or in using spoken or written languages. These may be manifested in disorders of listening, thinking, talking, reading, writing, spelling, or arithmetic. They include conditions which have been referred to as perceptual handicaps, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, developmental aphasia, etc. They do not include learning problems which are due primarily to visual, hearing, or motor handicaps, to mental retardation, emotional disturbance, or to environmental disadvantage" (Special education for handicapped for handicapped children, 1968).

    When Congress passed Public Law 91-230, the Elementary and Secondary Amendments of 1969, this definition was adopted and when Public Law 94-142 or the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was passed this same definition was accepted. The current IDEA definition of learning disabilities remains unchanged since 1969.

 << Back

	Nonverbal Learning Disability
	Dyslexia
	Dyscalculia