Dyslexia Led Steven Spielberg to Make Movies

This month is the 50th anniversary of Jaws, the stunningly imaginative and consummately crafted blockbuster summer movie that has had a huge effect on movie-making and popular culture.

And yet Jaws might never have existed if its director, Steven Spielberg, had not suffered a certain cognitive challenge when growing up.

Spielberg remembers the keen embarrassment he felt as a boy when asked to read out loud in school. As he said many years later: “I was unable to read for at least two years — I was two years behind the rest of my class. And, of course, I went through what everybody goes through — teasing. The teasing led to a lot of other problems I was having in school, but it all stemmed from the fact that I was embarrassed to stand up in front of the class and read.”

Neither he nor his parents nor his teachers knew he had dyslexia. This was during a time when few people were aware of such learning disabilities, which meant that kids like Spielberg indeed were often teased and lived in constant fear of classroom humiliation. Each day he had to read aloud would be "another long day in the series of the worst days of my life.” Some of his teachers thought he was "lazy," which this intensely curious kid was most definitely not.

Fortunately for Spielberg, his vigilant, devoted parents found ways to help him, his mother attending to his reading and his father addressing other areas.

And, he found an alternative way to bolster his self-confidence: He made movies. As he dramatized recently in his largely autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, the young Spielberg began telling stories with a Super 8 movie camera. It was his creative escape.

Remarkably, Spielberg didn't realize that he had dyslexia until he was more than 60 years old.

There are important lessons in Spielberg's experience.

Recent perspectives on dyslexia present a quite different take on how it reflects on a person's capabilities. So much of education emphasizes learning that comes from reading; however, other important ways of learning are often overlooked and undervalued. Dyslexia can be viewed as less of a learning disability than a sign that someone learns best in a different way. People with dyslexia seem to be better at seeing things from a broad perspective, less distracted by trivial details. Their greater tendency to think visually, in multiple dimensions, and in narrative terms, can lend itself to more creative thinking.

That some people find reading difficult, in the context of the range of types of abilities, shows that this is a "weakness" among other strengths. Educational systems work better if they not only help students address their weaknesses, but also foster different strengths. Students can work on their weaknesses while surging ahead with their strengths. Also, this approach takes the pressure off classroom performance in fewer overvalued areas.

Spielberg's difficulty with reading does not mean that he dismisses the value of the written word. Many of his films have been inspired by biographies, novels, and good scripts. That he reads slowly has not turned out to be a problem. He believes that he absorbs the material better.

Spielberg has advice for people who have dyslexia: “You are not alone, and while you will have dyslexia for the rest of your life, you can dart between the raindrops to get where you want to go. It will not hold you back.”

Who knows what Spielberg would have done in his early life if he had not been challenged by dyslexia?