The Discovery Of The Child

318 THE DISCOVERY OF THE CHILD

will bring quiet and rest to the organs of speech. To these are
added the patient repetition of single vowel sounds and consonants;
breathing exercises form another part of the treatment. This is
not the place to describe in detail the way in which these exercises
are carried out; they are long and tedious and outside the range
of school teaching. But in my methods all the exercises for
the correction of speech have a place.

(a) The exercises in silence prepare the nerve tracts of speech
to receive new stimuli in a perfect manner.

(6) The lesson stages secure first of all clear, detached pro-
nunciation by the mistress of a few words (and specially of names
which it is desired to connect with concrete objects or ideas); in
this way there are set up clear and perfect auditory stimuli of
language; these stimuli are repeated by the teacher when the child
has added the idea of the object which the word represents (recog-
nition of object) to the enunciation of the name. Further, there is
involved the exciting of speech in the child, who must repeat that
single word aloud and pronounce the separate sounds of which
it is composed.

(c) The exercises in written language analyse the sounds of
the word and get them repeated separately in many ways; this is
done when the child is learning the separate letters of the alphabet,
.and when he is composing and writing words, repeating the
sounds of them, which in each case leads to the composed or
written word.

I believe that in the schools of the future there will disappear
the idea which is coming into existence today of correcting faults
-of speech in the elementary schools, and that there will be sub-
stituted another more rational idea of avoiding them, by caring
for the development of speech in the Children's Houses, at the
Age in which speech is establishing itself in children.
* * #

The process described above was confirmed so frequently in
athe innumerable schools which have arisen that the following
conclusions may be stated: