Basics of LD: Aren’t learning disabilities a modern excuse for poor school performance?

Question:

Aren’t learning disabilities a modern excuse for poor school performance?

Additional Info:

Answer:

The term “learning disability” came into use relatively recently.

Although Sam Kirk and Barbara Bateman had used it in print a year earlier, a speech by Kirk to a group of concerned parents in 1963 is often cited as the basis for using the term to describe these children. However, the difficulties that students faced due to learning disabilities were not new. Before the term was used widely, labels such as mild mental retardation, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, perceptual impairment, neurological impairment, and slow learner described children having similar difficulties in school. Now, many of these difficulties have been subsumed by learning disabilities.