lationship between the sound of any given word and the letters composing it. He soon discovers, to his dismay, that no such invariable relationship exists.
Unreason in Spelling
The child finds that some words speld alike ar pronounst differently, and that other words pronounst alike hav different spellings; that the same letter may hav different values in a single word, and that in a single word the same sound may be represented by different letters. One thing he quickly learns—that there is no way in which he may surely determin when, or why, a letter that has one value at one time has another at another time; no certain way to tel how to pronounce a word he has never heard, or how to spel a word he has never seen.
Distrusts His Own Reason Confused and discouraged by the irregularities and contradictions in the spelling of so many of the words he most frequently meets, and humiliated by the "mistakes" he constantly makes when he attempts to reason from the spelling of a familiar word to the spelling of an unfamiliar word—percieving, in fact, that the more he depends on reason, the more likely he is to go wrong—he comes to distrust his reason in all that concerns spelling, and to rely entirely on his memory. This is, of course, good reasoning on his part, but he does not know it; for his teachers, in wel-ment but mistaken efforts to impart some educational value to the spelling-lesson, ar too prone to burden him with rules—themselvs overburdend with exceptions—that make him feel that there may be some sistem or order in it all that he is powerless to grasp. The
