eginning of the work in school. It must be remembered
that heretofore the child has been under the watchful care of the
parents during most of his hours, while now, with the beginning of his
work in school, he is having his first small taste of facing the world
alone--even if only for a little while each day.

Regardless of the attitude which the child takes toward his work in
school, this work presents new problems and new possibilities of danger
from a standpoint of speech development. A slight defect in utterance
which at home is passed over from long familiarity, is the subject of
ridicule and laughter at school. For the first time in the child-life,
the stammering or stuttering youngster may experience the awful feeling
of being laughed at and made fun of, without exactly knowing why. He
will have to face the questions of his thoughtless companions who will
attempt to make him talk merely for the sake of entertaining
themselves. To the child who stutters or stammers, this is torture in
its worst form. The humiliation and disgrace which the stammering child
must undergo on the way to school, in the school-yard and on the way
home again, is a tremendous force in the life of the youngster--a force
which may seriously impede his mental development, his physical welfare
and his progress in school. He finds himself unlike others, deficient
in some respect and yet not realizing the exact nature of his
deficiency or understanding why it should be a deficiency. He stands up
to recite with a constantly increasing fear of failure in his heart and
unless he is fortunate enough to have a teacher who understands, is apt
to fare poorly at her hands, also. Even in the case of the teacher who
does understand the child's difficulty and consequently permits written
instead of oral recitations, there is a constant feeling of inability
on the part of the child, a knowledge of being less-whole than those
about him, which saps the self-confidence so necessary to proper mental
development and normal progress. He furthermore misses much of the
value of the studies that he pursues, for, as a noted educator has
said, "In order for a child to remember and fix clearly in his own mind
the things he studies, those things must be repeated in oral
recitation." And this the stammering or stuttering child cannot do.

SENDING STAMMERING CHILDREN TO SCHOOL: With these facts in mind, the
question arises as to whether it is ever policy to send a stammer