Éducation et Dyslexie (1972)
Alfred Tomatis’s second major book, published by Éditions Sociales Françaises in 1972 (in the “Sciences de l’éducation” series). The author addresses head-on one of the most burning problems of the psycho-social topicality of the day, dyslexia, and proposes a then unprecedented thesis: dyslexia is first and foremost a disorder of listening, and it is through auditory re-education that it can be lifted. A synthesis of more than twelve thousand personal cases, the work unfolds a path that leads from the educator to the psychologist by way of the physician, and culminates in an anthropology of reading in which the ear plays the central role.
“Dyslexia is an auditory problem. (…) Does the child hear and, in a second moment, does he listen? Nothing has changed since the dawn of time; does writing not recall that, if it is true that man hears, it is also true that he is often closed to listening?”
Presentation
When he published Éducation et Dyslexie in 1972, Dr Alfred Tomatis already had some twenty years of clinical practice behind him and more than twelve thousand dyslexic cases treated. He chose to address what he himself called “one of the most burning problems of the current psycho-social scene”: a disorder whose spread is “ever wider” and which resists all attempts at medical, psychological or pedagogical definition.
The project of the work is threefold. First, to take stock: what has been said about dyslexia from Berlin and Buns (1881) up to the contemporary work of Borel-Maisonny, Mucchielli and Ajuriaguerra? Second, to set out the author’s personal thesis: dyslexia is neither a defect of sight, nor a “chromosomal flaw”, nor an educational delay — it is a disorder of listening, that is to say of the voluntary auditory function which allows the ear to select, analyse and integrate language. Third, to propose a therapeutic path: the educational cure through the Electronic Ear, whose efficacy has been observed in thousands of children.
The work supports a clinical insight of great reach: “without an ear, no reading”. One reads with one’s ear because reading presupposes the mastery of the sonic structures of language — phonemes, prosody, rhythm — which only an active ear can extract from the verbal flow. When that listening fails, the letter blurs, words run into each other, the child stumbles. Dyslexia is therefore not an incapacity, but the inscription, in the letter, of a closure to listening that has built up well before the learning of reading itself.
The author defends this thesis with the rigour of the clinician and the warmth of the educator. The tone is readily polemical — Tomatis spares neither the medicine of his time, which is happy to “make a fortune” from a single word, nor the pedagogy that is quick to inflict the label “dyslexic”. But the polemic is always on behalf of the child struggling to read, who must be “liberated” from anxiety rather than locked into a “category”.
Contents
The work follows a rigorous path that leads, chapter by chapter, from the definition of the symptom to its therapeutics:
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Introduction — Dyslexia as “the disease of the century”: stakes, semantic drifts, proliferation of the label.
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1. What is meant by “Dyslexia”? — History of the term from Berlin and Buns (1881); critical review of the successive neologisms (Alexia, Typhology, Bradylexia, Legasthenia…).
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The educator faced with dyslexia — From Antiquity to Comenius, Locke, Pestalozzi, Decroly, Freinet: how the pedagogy of reading has shaped, unknowingly, the dyslexic terrain.
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The physician faced with dyslexia — Broca, Wernicke, Dejerine and the great tradition of the aphasias; the blind spots of cerebral medicine in the face of a disorder unlike its own.
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The psychologist faced with dyslexia — Binet, Piaget, Wallon, Ajuriaguerra: what psychology has seen, what it has refused to see.
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The ear, central organ of reading — The Tomatis Effect, the directing ear, auditory lateralisation; embryological, anatomical and cybernetic arguments.
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The educational cure — Principles of audio-vocal education under the Electronic Ear; case studies (Alexandra, Stéphane and many others); results and durations.
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Conclusion — From the ear to education: for a school that no longer generates dyslexics.
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Bibliography — 105 references, from Plato to Mucchielli.
Extract
“If it is easy to call a cat a cat, why should one persist in calling the difficulty of learning to read ‘Dyslexia’? (…) The word Dyslexia is making its fortune and spreading like an epidemic that strikes the most valiant. Many of us are even wondering whether we are not a little dyslexic, and to what degree we might be.”
— Chapter 1, “What is meant by ‘Dyslexia’”
Place in the work
The second major work of Alfred Tomatis after L’Oreille et le Langage (Le Seuil, 1963), Éducation et Dyslexie inaugurates the cycle of three books published by ESF in the “Sciences de l’éducation” series: La Libération d’Œdipe (1972) and Vers l’écoute humaine (1974) would complete it. It represents the first systematic clinical application of the discoveries set out in 1963, and will remain, among all of Tomatis’s writings, the one in which the properly pedagogical dimension of the method is most explicit. Indispensable reading for anyone interested in dyslexia, the pedagogy of reading, speech therapy or, more broadly, the specific disorders of school learning.
In brief
Éducation et Dyslexie overturns the dominant diagnosis: dyslexia is not a disorder of the gaze, of the brain or of intelligence, but a disorder of listening. The whole of Tomatis’s demonstration aims to establish that, without an active ear, the letter remains inaccessible — and that this ear can be educated. To the child struggling to read he therefore proposes not a palliative but a true reopening of the auditory channel, through the Electronic Ear cure he has devised.
Beyond dyslexia itself, the work is a manifesto for an education that places listening at the heart of transmission. Drawing on more than twelve thousand clinical cases, supported by a remarkable historical survey running from Antiquity to the educators of the twentieth century, it is at once a book by an educator, a physician and a thinker — that of a man who wishes “to fight against the dyslexic state” because to yield to it is to leave a third of schoolable children on the very threshold of knowledge.
Available in libraries — BnF, Sudoc.