ing or
stuttering child to school, knowing that he is afflicted with a
speech-disorder. In the first place the parents who send a stammering
child to school exhibit a careless disregard for the rights of others
and a further disregard for the many children who must, of a necessity,
associate with this stammering child, with all the consequent dangers
of infection by imitation or mimicry. Speech defects of a remediable
nature among school children could be materially reduced by refusing to
allow children so afflicted to play or in any way associate with the
others who talk normally.

Aside, however, from the question of the parents' obligation to society
and to the children of others (which should be, in the end, a means of
protection for their own children, as well) there is the bigger and
more selfish aspect of the question, viz.: the effect on the child
himself.

No better suggestion can be given than that contained in "The Habit of
Success" by Luther H. Gulick, who says: "If you take a child that is
really mentally subnormal and put him in school with normal children,
he cannot do well no matter how hard he tries. He tries again and again
and fails. Then he is scolded and punished, kept after school and held
up to the ridicule of the teacher and other students. When he goes out
on the playground, he cannot play with the vigor and skill and force of
other children. In the plays, he is not wanted on either side; he is
always 'it' in tag. So he soon acquires the presentment that he is
going to fail no matter what he does, that he cannot do as the others
do and that there is no use in trying. So he gives up trying. He quits.

"That is the largest element in the lives of the feeble-minded--that
conviction that they cannot do like others, and is the first thing they
must overcome if they are to be helped. There is no hope whatever of
growth, as long as they foresee they are going to fail."

The futility of trying to "cram" an education into a subnormal child
has never been better expressed than in the statement quoted above.
There is nothing to be gained by insisting that a child who is ill,
attend school--and it should be remembered that so far as school is
concerned, the child who stutters or stammers is just as ill as the one
with the measles, save that the illness of the stammering or stuttering
child is chronic and persistent, while that of the other is temporary.

CHANCES FOR OUTGROWING AT THIS AGE: The opportun