The Story of My Life
and she was silent a few minutes. Then she asked clear, penetrating
questions about the terms of the surrender, and began to discuss them.
Both Mr. Gilman and Mr. Keith, the teachers who prepared her for
college, were struck by her power of constructive reasoning; and she was
excellent in pure mathematics, though she seems never to have enjoyed
it much. Some of the best of her writing, apart from her fanciful
and imaginative work, is her exposition in examinations and technical
themes, and in some letters which she found it necessary to write to
clear up misunderstandings, and which are models of close thinking
enforced with sweet vehemence.
She is an optimist and an idealist.
"I hope," she writes in a letter, "that L---- isn't too practical, for
if she is, I'm afraid she'll miss a great deal of pleasure."
In the diary that she kept at the Wright-Humason School in New York she
wrote on October 18, 1894, "I find that I have four things to learn in
my school life here, and indeed, in life--to think clearly without hurry
or confusion, to love everybody sincerely, to act in everything with the
highest motives, and to trust in dear God unhesitatingly."
CHAPTER III. EDUCATION
It is now sixty-five years since Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe knew that he
had made his way through Laura Bridgman's fingers to her intelligence.
The names of Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller will always be linked
together, and it is necessary to understand what Dr. Howe did for his
pupil before one comes to an account of Miss Sullivan's work. For Dr.
Howe is the great pioneer on whose work that of Miss Sullivan and other
teachers of the deaf-blind immediately depends.
Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe was born in Boston, November 10, 1801, and died
in Boston, January 9, 1876. He was a great philanthropist, interested
especially in the education of all defectives, the feeble-minded, the
blind, and the deaf. Far in advance of his time he advocated many public
measures for the relief of the poor and the diseased, for which he was
laughed at then, but which have since been put into practice. As head
of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, he heard of Laura
Bridgman and had her brought to the Institution on October 4, 1837.
Laura Bridgman was born at Hanover, New Hampshire, December 21, 1829; so
she was almost eight years old when Dr. Howe began his experiments with
her. At the age of twenty-six months scarlet fever left her without
sight or hearing. She also lost her sense of smell and taste. Dr. Howe
was an experimental scientist and had in him the spirit of New England
transcendentalism with its large faith and large charities. Science and
faith together led him to try to make his way into the soul which he
believed was born in Laura Bridgman as in every other human being.
His plan was to teach Laura by means of raised types. He pasted raised
labels on objects and made her fit the labels to the objects and the
objects to the labels. When she had learned in this way to associate
raised words with things, in much the same manner, he says, as a dog
learns tricks, he began to resolve the words into their letter elements
and to teach her to put together "k-e-y," "c-a-p." His success convinced
him that language can be conveyed through type to the mind of the
blind-deaf child, who, before education, is in the state of the baby who
has not learned to prattle; indeed, is in a much worse state, for the
brain has grown in years without natural nourishment.
After Laura's education had progressed for two months with the use only
of raised letters, Dr. Howe sent one of his teachers to learn the manual
alphabet from a deaf-mute. She taught it to Laura, and from that time on
the manual alphabet was the means of communicating with her.
After the first year or two Dr. Howe did not teach Laura Bridgman
himself, but gave her over to other teachers, who under his direction
carried on the work of teaching her language.
Too much cannot be said in praise of Dr. Howe's work. As an investigator
he kept always the scientist's attitude. He never forgot to keep
his records of Laura Bridgman in the fashion of one who works in
a laboratory. The result is, his records of her are systematic and
careful. From a scientific standpoint it is unfortunate that it was
impossible to keep such a complete record of Helen Keller's development.
This in itself is a great comment on the difference between Laura
Bridgman and Helen Keller. Laura always remained an object of curious
study. Helen Keller became so rapidly a distinctive personality that she
kept her teacher in a breathless race to meet the needs of her pupil,
with no time or strength to make a scientific study.
In some ways this is unfortunate. Miss Sullivan knew at the beginning
that Helen Keller would be more interesting and successful than Laura
Bridgman, and she expresses in one of her letters the need of keeping
notes. But neither temperament nor training allowed her to make her
pupil the object of any experiment or observation which did not help in
the child's development. As soon as a thing was done, a definite goal
passed, the teacher did not always look back and describe the way she
had come. The explanation of the fact was unimportant compared to the
fact itself and the need of hurrying on. There are two other reasons why
Miss Sullivan's records are incomplete. It has always been a severe tax
on her eyes to write, and she was early discouraged from publishing data
by the inaccurate use made of what she at first supplied.
When she first wrote from Tuscumbia to Mr. Michael Anagnos, Dr. Howes
son-in-law and his successor as Director of the Perkins Institution,
about her work with her pupil, the Boston papers began at once to
publish exaggerated accounts of Helen Keller. Miss Sullivan protested.
In a letter dated April 10, 1887, only five weeks after she went to
Helen Keller, she wrote to a friend:
"--sent me a Boston Herald containing a stupid article about Helen. How
perfectly absurd to say that Helen is 'already talking fluently!' Why,
one might just as well say that a two-year-old child converses fluently
when he says 'apple give,' or 'baby walk go.' I suppose if you included
his screaming, crowing, whimpering, grunting, squalling, with occasional
kicks, in his conversation, it might be regarded as fluent--even
eloquent. Then it is amusing to read of the elaborate preparation I
underwent to fit me for the great task my friends entrusted to me. I am
sorry that preparation didn't include spelling, it would have saved me
such a lot of trouble."
On March 4, 1888, she writes in a letter:
"Indeed, I am heartily glad that I don't know all that is being said and
written about Helen and myself. I assure you I know quite enough. Nearly
every mail brings some absurd statement, printed or written. The truth
is not wonderful enough to suit the newspapers; so they enlarge upon it
and invent ridiculous embellishments. One paper has Helen demonstrating
problems in geometry by means of her playing blocks. I expect to hear
next that she has written a treatise on the origin and future of the
planets!"
In December, 1887, appeared the first report of the Director of the
Perkins Institution, which deals with Helen Keller. For this report
Miss Sullivan prepared, in reluctant compliance with the request of
Mr. Anagnos, an account of her work. This with the extracts from her
letters, scattered through the report, is the first valid source of
information about Helen Keller. Of this report Miss Sullivan wrote in a
letter dated October 30, 1887:
"Have you seen the paper I wrote for the 'report'? Mr. Anagnos was
delighted with it. He says Helen's progress has been 'a triumphal march
from the beginning,' and he has many flattering things to say about
her teacher. I think he is inclined to exaggerate; at all events, his
language is too glowing, and simple facts are set forth in such a manner
that they bewilder one. Doubtless the work of the past few months does
seem like a triumphal march to him; but then people seldom see the
halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is
achieved."
As Mr. Anagnos was the head of a great institution, what he said had
much more effect than the facts in Miss Sullivan's account on which he
based his statements. The newspapers caught Mr. Anagnos's spirit and
exaggerated a hundred-fold. In a year after she first went to Helen
Keller, Miss Sullivan found herself and her pupil the centre of a
stupendous fiction. Then the educators all over the world said their
say and for the most part did not help matters. There grew up a mass of
controversial matter which it is amusing to read now. Teachers of the
deaf proved a priori that what Miss Sullivan had done could not be,
and some discredit was reflected on her statements, because they were
surrounded by the vague eloquence of Mr. Anagnos. Thus the story of
Helen Keller, incredible when told with moderation, had the misfortune
to be heralded by exaggerated announcements, and naturally met either an
ignorant credulity or an incredulous hostility.
In November, 1888, another report of the Perkins Institution appeared
with a second paper by Miss Sullivan, and then nothing official was
published until November, 1891, when Mr. Anagnos issued the last Perkins
Institution report containing anything about Helen Keller. For this
report Miss Sullivan wrote the fullest and largest account she has
ever written; and in this report appeared the "Frost King," which is
discussed fully in a later chapter. Then the controversy waxed fiercer
than ever.
Finding that other people seemed to know so much more about Helen Keller
than she did, Miss Sullivan kept silent and has been silent for ten
years, except for her paper in the first Volta Bureau Souvenir of Helen
Keller and the paper which, at Dr. Bell's request, she prepared in 1894
for the meeting at Chautauqua of the American Association to Promote the
Teaching of Speech to the Deaf. When Dr. Bell and others tell her, what
is certainly true from an impersonal point of view, that she owes it
to the cause of education to write what she knows, she answers very
properly that she owes all her time and all her energies to her pupil.
Although Miss Sullivan is still rather amused than distressed when some
one, even one of her friends, makes mistakes in published articles
about her and Miss Keller, still she sees that Miss Keller's book should
include all the information that the teacher could at present furnish.
So she consented to the publication of extracts from letters which she
wrote during the first year of her work with her pupil. These letters
were written to Mrs. Sophia C. Hopkins, the only person to whom Miss
Sullivan ever wrote freely. Mrs. Hopkins has been a matron at the
Perkins Institution for twenty years, and during the time that Miss
Sullivan was a pupil there she was like a mother to her. In these
letters we have an almost weekly record of Miss Sullivan's work. Some of
the details she had forgotten, as she grew more and more to generalize.
Many people have thought that any attempt to find the principles in
her method would be nothing but a later theory superimposed on Miss
Sullivan's work. But it is evident that in these letters she was making
a clear analysis of what she was doing. She was her own critic, and in
spite of her later declaration, made with her modest carelessness, that
she followed no particular method, she was very clearly learning from
her task and phrasing at the time principles of education of unique
value not only in the teaching of the deaf but in the teaching of all
children. The extracts from her letters and reports form an important
contribution to pedagogy, and more than justify the opinion of Dr.