Learning Disabilities Clarified:
Learning is a Skill (Part Three)

SUBSKILLS OF LEARNING

The Audiblox exercises require a great deal of concentration. A person who regularly does exercises of this nature, will thereby improve his powers of concentration tremendously. Many parents and teachers nowadays complain about the fact that children cannot concentrate. This is usually regarded as a disability. However, if one questions what has been done to teach the child to concentrate, one invariably finds that nothing has been done. Remember the truth about learning which I stated earlier on, that a human being cannot do anything which he has not learned to do. Concentration is a skill, one of the subskills of learning, and any skill has to be acquired, after which one’s proficiency at it can be constantly improved by regular and sustained practice.

A further subskill of learning which is very heavily emphasized throughout the whole Audiblox program is perception. As a matter of fact, the Audiblox program is a very comprehensive and extremely effective program for perceptual development. Before we can learn anything, we have to become aware of it through one of our senses. Usually we have to see or hear it. Subsequently one has to interpret whatever one has seen or heard. In essence then, perception means interpretation. Of course, lack of experience may cause a person to misinterpret what he has seen or heard. Perception is therefore a skill which can be improved tremendously through practice. A further important point about perception is that it is a skill which is by itself made up of a large number of subskills. One of these is, for instance, the ability to distinguish left and right. One frequently comes across children who confuse a b with a d, or who read no when the word is actually on. This does not mean that there is anything wrong at all with such a child. He has simply not yet learned to distinguish well enough between left and right. Invariably such children are also very poor readers and spellers. Once they have learned, through the regular and sustained practice which the Audiblox program provides, to distinguish between left and right, they will stop confusing b’s and d’s, and words like now and won, and at the same time their reading, and later also their spelling ability, will improve immensely.

Perceptual skill is extremely important in order to become a good reader. As far as reading is concerned, perception is a foundational skill, just as counting is for the ability to calculate. A person who cannot learn to spell, or who cannot learn to read, a so-called dyslexic, is frequently simply a person in whom one or more of these subskills of perception have not been adequately developed in order to make it possible for this person to acquire the skill of reading. The fact that already many so-called dyslexics have with the help of the Audiblox program succeeded in acquiring a normal reading ability, must be adequate proof that it is an extremely comprehensive and effective program for the development of all the subskills of perception.

The Audiblox program is an extremely effective program for memory training. Memory is, of course, a further subskill of learning. Having perceived something, we have to be able to store it, that is, remember it, before it will become knowledge. This is a skill which is of special importance in the so-called learning subjects at school or university, where information is presented to the learner, and it is expected that he be able to reproduce it as accurately as possible. However, memory is a skill that is also of great importance to the reading act. For example, recognizing the shapes of the different letters comprising a particular word is an act of memory. Every word also consists of letters in a particular sequence, and one has to remember what word is represented by the sequence of letters in question. Simply by changing the sequence of the letters in name, it can become mean or amen. Memory is a subskill of learning which can itself also be subdivided into a number of subskills, for example short-term visual memory and long-term visual memory, short-term auditory memory and long-term auditory memory. All these receive attention in the Audiblox program.

Having stored information in one’s memory, it is sometimes required that a person be able to process it in some fashion. This is of importance in subjects like mathematics or language. Such processing of information usually requires the ability to see relationships or correspondences, or to draw conclusions. This requires an ability to reason and think logically, also a very important subskill of learning, which is heavily emphasized in the Audiblox program.

Returning to the matter of learning disabilities, it must be clearly understood that it is not my intention to imply that the theory expounded in the discussion must be regarded as the only cause of all learning failure. There certainly are other factors which cause children to be poor learners. For example, there are many children who cannot cope due to emotional instability. In many cases such emotional problems are brought about by the fact that the child has already experienced so many failures that he believes himself to be inferior to other children. By helping the child to improve his learning skills, and thereby to start experiencing the satisfaction of success, such emotional problems are frequently alleviated. It must be understood, however, that there are many other causes of emotional problems, which cannot be dealt with here.

A further cause for learning failure is the fact that the level of difficulty of the subject matter that the child is expected to master becomes higher and higher every year. In each new grade to which a child is promoted he has to be able to master work which is more, and more difficult, than that he had to deal with the previous year. Of course, as a child gets older, his intellectual ability also grows. Sometimes, however, the increase of the level of difficulty of the subject matter from year to year occurs at a faster rate than the growth of the child’s intellectual ability. It is then that the child starts having difficulties. The only solution is to develop the child’s learning skills by means of a program like the Audiblox program. This will improve the child’s learning ability, so that he will be able to keep up with increasing pressure. Because all children run a risk of being overtaken by the level of difficulty of the school subject matter, it is therefore wise to take timely precautions. Nobody would ever gamble with a child’s physical life and well-being. Why then gamble with a child’s learning life and well-being? By teaching the child to learn, any future mishaps will be prevented.

Even a child who is less gifted can benefit greatly from a regular program of exercise for the subskills of learning. A comparison with the physical counterpart should make this clear. If a very big man takes up weight-lifting, he could become very strong indeed. A much smaller man can also increase his strength considerably by exercising with weights, but he will never be able to match the strength of the big man. If the big man does not exercise and the smaller man does, then of course there is the very real possibility that the strength of the smaller man will in time surpass that of the big man. Similarly, a less gifted child will derive a lot of benefit from the mental exercise provided by the Audiblox program, and may even in time exceed the achievement level of an initially more gifted child who does not take part in any program of this nature.

In the determination of man’s behavior, there is no process more important than learning. One of the most worthwhile enterprises a person could engage in is therefore to help unravel the mysteries of this process. No final answers concerning the nature of learning have yet been presented. The existing theories on learning all leave too many unanswered questions. The approach offered in this discussion is an attempt to find logical answers to some of these. If learning is a skill, as is suggested by this theory, then a solution immediately becomes available for all the many children who battle with co-called learning disabilities.

Author bio: Dr. Jan Strydom holds a doctorate in education and an M.A. in philosophy. He is the developer of the Audiblox program and the co-author of two books. Visit his website at www.audiblox2000.com