Reading, Writing, and Rage: The Terrible Price Paid by Victims of School Failure

Abstract

Dorothy Ungerleider, an educational therapist, has written a sensitive, detailed history of a learningdisabled child's experience in the school and the family environment. She chronicles Tony Petri's experience through each grade with a detailed analysis of his triumphs and failures, academically and emotionally. She succeeds in realistically unraveling the entanglements of perceptual difficulties and emotional responses so that the final common pathway of school failure and lack of motivation is better understood. Anger and rage, fostered by years of failure and a poorly responsive educational system, are finally presented from a student's point of view, leaving us with new insights for early intervention. This is not an academic analysis of the emotional difficulties of learning-disabled children. It is simply one young man's story, described with all the character development and dramatic style of a novel. It is enjoyable reading because of a lively descriptive prose style, yet it is also