When you know better, do better

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

One day, Thomas Edison came home and handed a paper to his mother, “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 years, when Edison’s mother had died and he was one of the great inventors of the century, he looked through old family items.  He unexpectedly saw a folded paper in the corner of the desk drawer.  Opening it, he read: "Your son is addled [mentally ill]. We won’t let him come to school any more."

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