There is an old song that goes, "Look down, look down, that lonesome road, before you travel on." Facing that lonesome road, the adult might travel on. Often, the child can't.

During her twenty-year career as a school social worker, Anne Stilwell worked with two thousand "problem" children. She and her husband, professional writer Hart Stilwell, present here twenty-one factual accounts of children who suffered rejection in the public schools.

Some of the children in these accounts are unusually bright and some are mentally retarded. They are belligerent and destructive or...