Hello and thank you to all the contributors to this gripping thead. The common thing about all of you is that in the face of all of the horrors mentioned you still have hope and believe that things can be made better. The generation we are talking about don't have any hope. The point was made by Barry that in education lies some future but what do we mean when we talk about education? Do we mean the present systems which seem from a certain age, to decide that the aquisition of knowledge should cease and be replaced by the pusuit of general certificates of education, which are devalued when too many people obtain them, and are then succeeded by higher levels, which are in turn devalued and so on. We have know reached the point were you have to obtain qualifications before you can get educated, or obtain further training, let alone obtain employment! We have got ourseves in a muddle over this issue. In order to protect children from exploitation we pass laws to compel them to attend schools. We seem to have accepted that the main purpose of education is to enable people to obtain work to enable them to obtain material things. That is the only sense of value that we seem to have given our children and it is no wonder that they see that they are being prevented from working, to obtain the things we advertise to them, by having to attend schools. If that is the main purpose of education then why don't we just let them work? No wonder they are mad at us. Of couse it is not the main purpose of education, it also serves as an institution that looks after our children while we go out to work, to obtain the material things that we give them, to make up for the guilt we feel at not satisfying their other needs, when we are too exausted after working to supply their material needs. Is it not about time also that we stopped the competitve aspect of education? Winners or losers they are still going to be making up our society. If we take our children away from the people who should be preparing them for the world and place them in institutions, shouldn't those institutions be the place where they can learn the skills they need to live? Where else can they find them,the streets? Our generation had our dreams and we could sing about them, their generation has no dreams only nightmares and their music reflects this. Sail on