What Is a Disability?

Originally published here on June 26, 2008.

What is a disability? That sounds like a simple question. But if you work in special education in the U.S. you probably know that it isn't all that simple. The definition of "specific learning disability" has changed considerably in the last few years.

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting story last week in its news blog. Congress has been tinkering with the definition of the term "disability." They eventually decided to leave it unchanged for the purposes of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Congress looked at broadening the definition. Here's how the Chronicle explained it:

The bill maintains the existing definition that a disability must “substantially limit” a “major life activity” to be considered for coverage under the law. An earlier bill, opposed by college officials, had defined a disability as any “physical or mental impairment.”

This highlights a couple of ideas. First, disability is a social construct. Often we codify it in law. But even then, the definition varies somewhat from law to law, depending on the purpose of the particular law we're discussing.

Second, a disability is not a medical condition. It may be the result of a medical condition. But some people with epilepsy have a disability and some people with epilepsy don't. Substitute whatever medical issue, condition, syndrome or disorder you like for "epilepsy." The issue remains how it affects you, how it limits your activity. And very similar disabilities can be the result of very different medical conditions.

Society is interested largely in accommodating disabilities. How well we protect the disabled in our society is a measure of the maturity of our civilization and of the value we place on human life.

Reading the Chronicle blog post made me think back to the dyslexia discussion with Hugo Kerr (and others) last month that I had on the Reading Teachers listserv (hosted by the International Reading Association). Hugo wanted to define the term "dyslexia" more clearly and called it "an innate, neurological condition." He wants dyslexia to be a medical condition. And yet both the International Dyslexia Association and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes say that dyslexia is a disability.

If we accept the idea that "dyslexia" is the name of a disability (not of a medical condition, per se), it becomes much easier to understand why so much disagreement exists about the causes and symptom of dyslexia. If we see dyslexia as the name of a disability, it becomes easier to understand why rates of dyslexia vary from place to place. In a society without books and reading there'd be no dyslexia - even if the same neurological problems that lead to dyslexia in the US or Britain were common. (An example of such a society is the Lashi of Myanmar; the 30,000 or so Lashi-speakers have only a 1% literacy rate in their own language.)

Does dyslexia exist? If it is a medical or biological condition, the research is still not completely in on that question. But if it is simply a name for a disability, for a set of problems or symptoms that impede the way an individual copes with an important part of life (reading) in modern society, then dyslexia exists. Its status may be in danger; it could be completely subsumed into the legal/educational concept of "learning disabilities." But at the moment it exists. And it exists simply because we say it does. What we mean by the word "dyslexia" may change. It may have more than one cause. But it exists in the realm of ideas, and it will continue to exist as long as it is a useful idea...