"Little Tommy is too stupid to learn..."

The four-year old deaf boy - Little Tommy

One day a partially deaf 4-year old boy came home from school. In his pocket was a note from his teacher. The note read "Your Tommy is too stupid to learn. Get him out of the school." His mother read the note and answered, "My Tommy is not too stupid to learn, I will teach him myself."

And so little Tommy dropped out of school and was home-schooled.

Little Tommy grew up to be the great inventor Thomas Alva Edison.

Edison only had three months of schooling.

Thomas Alva Edison, inventor, businessman

Source: You Can Win by Shiv Khera

A different version of this story reads:

One day Thomas Edison came home and gave a paper to his mother. He told her, “My teacher gave this paper to me and told me to only give it to my mother.”

His mother’s eyes were tearful as she read the letter out loud to her child: Your son is a genius. This school is too small for him and doesn’t have enough good teachers for training him. Please teach him yourself.

After many, many years, after Edison’s mother died and he was now one of the greatest inventors of the century, one day he was looking through old family things. Suddenly he saw a folded paper in the corner of a drawer in a desk. He took it and opened it up. On the paper was written: Your son is addled [mentally ill]. We won’t let him come to school any more.

Edison cried for hours and then he wrote in his diary: “Thomas Alva Edison was an addled child that, by a hero mother, became the genius of the century.”

Source: Thomas Edison Mother’s Letter Changed The World (https://englishbookgeorgia.com/blogebg/thomas-edison-mothers-letter-changed-the-world/)