Learning Disabilities at Twenty-Five: The Early Adulthood of a Maturing Concept.

Abstract

It is an honor to be the keynote speaker at the 25th anniversary of this fine organization. I have taken the liberty of conceptualizing this not just as the 25th anniversary of ACLD, but as the 25th anniversary of learning disabilities. I like to think that before this organization started, learning disabilities was in its embryonic stage and that the beginning of this organization was the actual birth of the concept. With this in mind, I think it is useful to pause at this age to think about the significance of being 25 years old and the kinds of early midlife crises that an organization faces just as a person might face at 25. As one assesses one's 25 year old status, obviously the important things are to look backward, to know where one has come from, and to be able to look ahead and get a sense of what the future holds. For a field to keep advancing, it must go back and question its abstractions. It must be able to look at the abstract concepts that developed over the years, that can become, in a sense, concrete rather than abstract without us knowing it. Alfred North Whitehead used to call this the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," namely, the notion that there are some abstractions that we develop to characterize some phenomena; over time we no longer recognize them as mere abstractions but come to think they are a concrete entities. At this stage in the development of an organization and a concept, it is great to be able to look around and at least momentarily liberate ourselves from some of the intellectual constraints we may have acquired along the way. With that in mind, I amgoing to explore the field ofleaming disabilities and hopefully be able to suggest some implications for the future.

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