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 stammering 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.