It Takes a Village Idiot

Good article in the Register. I didn’t know how to add to the interesting diversity of comments, so I’ll add a comment here.
Raising a child with moderate to severe intellectual difficulties, by whatever appellation (“learning disability”, etc.) is better understood by those who’ve had the experience. Experience is not, after all, the best teacher; it’s the only one. All the rest is theory, policy, philosophy, which, next to actual experience, is worthless. The comments all argued within the combative arena of opposing philosophies, none of which has anything to do with the child. The only voice that does have anything to do with the child is the voice of experience. But, like the characters in E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”, people argue philosophies while the child suffers untended. Philosophy must be borne of concrete experience to have any value other than just an interesting abstraction.