The Man Who Called It a Gift, Not a Disability

Remembering Ron Davis, and What His Work Has Meant to the Neurodivergent Community

I never had the chance to meet Ron Davis in person. Many of my colleagues did, and they carry warm memories of him as a gentle, funny and gifted person.

My own connection to his work began twenty years ago, when I first read 'The Gift of Dyslexia'. I bought it to help understand a dyslexic partner of mine, not realising how much it would go on to shape my own path.

This month, I have been listening to Ron's own account of his life, in his last book, 'Dummy: The Autobiography of a "retard"'. Hearing him describe it in his own words, the confusion, the isolation, the sense of not fitting into a world built for other kinds of minds, has reminded me just how significant his work really is, both for people on the autism spectrum, and those with dyslexic minds.

Ron's own story explains why. As a child, he was considered profoundly disabled, and expected to achieve very little. He went on to become an engineer, working on rocket design during the era of the Space Race, and later found success as a sculptor. It wasn't until 1980, while trying to answer a letter about his sculpting work, that he discovered something that would change everything: his mind could shift into a state where language disappeared and imagery took over, and that shift was connected to why reading had always felt impossible to him. What he'd found wasn't brain damage. It was a perceptual talent, one capable of creating real disorientation, but one he learned to work with rather than against. He used to say that all things truly powerful are truly simple. His own discovery was exactly that.

From there, he built an extraordinary body of work. He founded the Reading Research Council to investigate what he'd found, then Davis Dyslexia Association International to train facilitators like me, and later the Ron Davis Autism Foundation, extending his approach to autism as well.

More than forty years ago, Ron became one of the first people to speak openly about dyslexia and call it a gift, not a disability. At a time when the language around learning differences was almost entirely about deficit and disorder, he offered something radically different: a way of understanding these minds as differently-wired, not broken.

That single reframe changed the course of thousands of lives, including, eventually, mine.

Ron's methods now reach families and facilitators across 40 countries and 30 languages. But the number that matters most to me isn't the count of countries or translations. It's the shift in how a single person can come to see themselves, from broken to gifted, because someone was finally willing to say it out loud.

I didn't know Ron personally. But I know his work, intimately, because it's the work I live and do every day. And I know that every time I sit with a child or an adult and help them understand their own mind as a gift rather than a flaw, I am carrying forward life-changing work he started forty years ago.

Rest well, Ron.

Ngā mihi nui,

Rachel