A Better Tomorrow...

"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today." Malcolm X

To have a better tomorrow, we must educate our children.   It's all too easy to leave it to chance so that children work it out for themselves without guidance.  Without guidance we run the risk of things getting worse, not better. Children don't have to work it out for themselves.

-o0o-

The thing I remember most about David Senior was his shoes - his shoes were ripped apart by his feet.  They were cheap shoes, I expect, and David's family was doubtless much like the rest of us: stony broke so that once the shoes were torn, there'd be no money for new ones until the following September, at the start of the school year.  For the whole year then, David had the indignity of walking about with his feet exposed to all the elements.  There might, conceivably, have been another pair if his feet had grown length-wise or a pair of plimsolls but beyond that he would have no choice but to wear what had been bought for him.

Not that David Senior could walk very well, he was too large.  I now know that he had Prader-Willi syndrome - a rare genetic condition with a range of problems including the constant desire to eat.  David's sister often spat out at us, "he doesn't eat any more than the rest of us"  when people were taunting him but everyone in the entire world knew it was untrue. David did eat more than the rest of us.  He was always eating. He never stopped.  And that was because he was constantly starving.  I now understand that a child with Prader-Willi can eat three to six times more than children of a similar age and still be hungry but we just thought he was overweight and indulged.

You can read the rest here