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As is usually the case, editing a special edition of a highly respected journal is a mixed blessing, especially when the journal articles are solely about a country that is very different from the homeland of the major readership of the journal - that is, North America. We are honored to be able to co-edit a journal as prestigious as the Journal of Learning Disabilities, and we have been delighted to include a number of articles that form a conspectus on learning disabilities (LD) and learning difficulties in Australia. We believe that the best service we can provide to the readers is to highlight the similarities and differences that exist in the way learning disabilities are conceptualized and operationalized in Australia compared to North America.
Aim of the Special Series
We have brought together a wide range of Australian professionals concerned with the education of children and adolescents with learning disabilities/learning difficulties. It is appropriate at the outset to indicate that the diagnostic category of learning disability has much less relevance in Australia than it does in the United States of America. At least two of the authors of articles in this series were involved in the Select Committee on Specific Learning Difficulties appointed by the Australian government in 1974. The committee's final report was submitted to Parliament in 1976 (Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1976). A first point of particular interest in the committee's work was the very substantial effort by the Australian government to come to grips with the notion of learning disabilities (LD) as a diagnostic category, the identification and assessment of students with LD, recommendations for intervention, and the provision of resources to support students with LD in schools. The second, more interesting event that occurred during the operation of this committee was the inability of the committee to be able to discriminate between learning disabilities and learning difficulties. In fact, in the final report, the authors commented that there was no particular constancy about the then-current educational definitions of learning difficulties, and the committee expected that there would continue to be considerable change over time.
It is very difficult to judge whether the committee's concerns about the lack of definitional precision actually meant that the concept of specific learning...