We think that the education of our children is something that takes place in good faith by well-intentioned people who have no other agenda than the betterment of our next generation.

Perhaps it was once so, and perhaps with individuals, it is still the so. There are teachers who believe in the unique value of each child under their care, they believe in the future of the race, they believe in the nurturing and furtherance of the young mind, hoping to develop the best qualities of each individual, in the service of his own life, his future and the family and community he is part of.

But what of the outside forces that shape our education system, introducing labels with stigma attached.

There is the child who is not taught to read with phonics on a step by step basis, building up familiarity and recognition with the sounds and shapes of the letters he is seeing, how to combine, how different combinations are used to show different sounds, shape the way a word is pronounced, shifting its meaning slightly to tell us details such as when the action took place, now or in the far distant past, or still dreamed of in a future time, whether one or more people were involved and so on.

When the child didn’t spend enough time for that child to learn the letters all of the alphabet and know them cold, then is it any surprise that the same child sometimes can’t read a word that begins with a letter he or she can’t recognise.

What would you say? You would probably say the first thing that came into your head when the teacher asked you to read aloud in class. It doesn’t mean the child has dyslexia or has a mental disorder needing a drug to handle it or glasses so he can read.

It just means the child needs to practice recognising the letters of the alphabet a bit more and learn how to put the sounds together with other letters to make the sounds that words are made up of.

It’s a skill learned at school, at the mother’s knee or grandmother’s kitchen table, wherever it takes place. But it needs to take place, in every language with every student if that child is to learn to read and write.

It used to be called “The Three R’s”; Reading, Writing and ‘Rithmetic.

That’s a bit old fashioned nowadays, and sounds a bit boring.

But it’s still the backbone and foundation of a skillset that sets the child up for life.

And no amount of psychobabble or medication will substitute for doing the work and learning the basics.