Learning to Read Late Despite School

This is not a story of an unschooler, but his sister homeschools her children. How much happier Sorcha's brother would have been if he had not had all those years of school failure!! Will schools EVER accept late reading? (If so, might unschoolers have a good influence toward that?)

True story: my brother didn't read until he was about 17 years old. He "flunked" kindergarten, got dumped in LD with a teacher who told my parents he was dyslexic and would *never* be able to read. He took the Ohio Proficiency Test over and over and over before he was able to graduate. Then all of a sudden one day he could read. I get email from him and stare at it in amazement because it's so well- written. I have a birthday card he gave me only four years ago that looks like a six year old wrote it (invented spelling, no punctuation). He was nineteen that summer.

Today you'd never know he entered adulthood functionally illiterate. You can learn at any age. He's even started to get interested in books (he learned to read by reading car magazines. Before that my mom or I would read to him, but we were both bored to tears with his car magazines and he finally learned to read them himself).

Sorcha