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 opportunities for the stammering or stuttering child to outgrow his trouble are about five times as great in the Formative Period, between the ages of 2 and 6, as they are in the Speech-Setting Period, from 6 to 11.  In the former, as previously explained, statistics show that about 1 per cent.—­or one in a hundred—­outgrow their trouble before the age of 6, while after this age the percentage drops to one-fifth of one per cent, or about one person in every five hundred, which is a very small chance indeed.

In speaking of the tendency of parents to wait in the hope that speech disorders will be outgrown, Walter B. Swift, A.B., S.B., M.D., has this to say: 

“This suggestion may frequently be offered, even by the physician.  Many people say, ’Let the case alone and it will outgrow its defect.’  No treatment could be more foolish than this.  No advice could be more ill-advised; no suggestion could show more ignorance of the problems of speech.  Such advisers are ignorant of the harm they are doing and the amount of mental drill of which they are depriving the pupil.  Nor do they know at all whether or not the case will ever ‘outgrow’ its defect.  In brief, this advice is without foundation, without scientific backing, and should never be followed.”