I began the time of my children's education as a Christian and a socialist. Much of the time of that education has been under the governance of the Blair government.
I am dyslexic, my wife is dyslexic, my two boys are dyslexic. We have our own perspectives we wished to offer on our own childrens education. To cut a long story short: we came to understand the the educators of our children couldn't here what we were saying, because they were enthralled within a New Labour project of whole society reform.
Central to that reform agenda is a population who come to accept perspectives of thought and feeling, handed down to them by central government. We came to see this dispensing of authoritative perspective as hurting our kids: when we wanted to say that our dyslexic kids were just organised differently; the educators wanted to say our kids were at fault, educationally and socially, where they weren't quite prepared to get with the programme.
We locked horns with the educators: and although we could always throw them in any meeting; when once we left, they just defaulted to what they were doing before.
We came to see a kind of spinning process that all these educators were involved in: just all singing from one hymn sheet, just handed from top down; people who were progressively giving up the capacity to judge big things for themselves, by themselves.
Anyway, along came 9/11: and the whole world changed.
As Bush and Blair moved the world to war: we saw the same processes that we had locked horns with in education, being turned of the general population; as politicans bamboozled others into seeing things that were not there, spinning words and perspectives only to attain political goals.
The war came, and the carnage began: and we saw the same word weaseling going on; realities, human realities, were overlayered with words having little conncetion with truth and fact.
By this time we were no longer socialists: and our Christian faith certainly will never again see us standing with that Christianity represented by Bush and Blair; people who cannot stand on their own ground, and see what is there to be seen, are just no longer to be trusted.
For us this is now all tied up with our understanding of the dyslexic: we find ourselves "at some slight angle" to the world being built by Bush and Blair; where we may be forced to be in it, but we will certainly never be of it.
All this has rocked our world: and we still aren't sure how best to proceed; but we do know where we are never going back to.
When you are in a world, but not of it: you relate to the elements of that world, in order to have contact with people; but the syntax of your relation is different from the straights (those who buy into the orthodoxy of that world).
Our understanding is that it is this syntactical difference, that makes a person dyslexic.
I have acres of writing real estate on this topic: and it may be heading towards being some kind of book; where I think all I'm doing is taking a look at world process, from micro education to macro Iraq, from a strictly dyslexic viewpoint.