CLEFT PALATE IS NOT A LEARNING DISABILITY. It is a PHYSICAL disability.

So what? In the conceptual scheme of most of humanity for most of history, it meant you wrote the person off and didn't think of trying to do anything about it. Just as people with brain disorders like absence seizures got written off. For the person on the receiving end of a disabling label, it makes no difference at all which bit of their anatomy the label is stuck on.


It's BECAUSE I taught him that although he couldn't get rid of his learning disabilities, he could learn how to compensate for them, and because I taught him to never listen to people who tried to make him feel like he wasn't doing his best, that he was able to compensate for the faulty brain wiring that was causing him so much trouble in the schools.

Brains are not made of wires and mechanistic analogies never helped anybody.

Do you in fact know that your son doesn't have something in the same category as absence seizures or gluten intolerance - a condition you don't know the aetiology of, one that maybe nobody knows the aetiology of yet, but which might be easily fixable by adding a chemical or subtracting an environmental toxin? (A lot of parents of autistic kids have now learned not to take the experts' word for it that nothing can be done).

There is often no meaningful distinction between "curing" a condition and "compensating" for it. But there is a distinction between wanting to learn more about what can be done for it and shutting your mind to all but one alternative forever.