The Story of My Life
principle in Miss Sullivan's method, one that had practical results, and
one which, so far as I can discover, had never been put in practice in
the education of a deaf child, not to say a deaf-blind child, until Miss
Sullivan tried it with Helen Keller. And the principle had never been
formulated clearly until Miss Sullivan wrote her letters.
The second principle in her method (the numerical order is, of course,
arbitrary) is never to talk to the child about things distasteful or
wearisome to him. In the first deaf school Miss Sullivan ever visited,
the teacher was busy at the blackboard telling the children by written
words something they did not want to know, while they were crowding
round their visitor with wide-awake curiosity, showing there were a
thousand things they did want to know. Why not, says Miss Sullivan, make
a language lesson out of what they were interested in?
Akin to this idea of talking to the child about what interests him, is
the principle never to silence a child who asks questions, but to
answer the questions as truly as possible; for, says Miss Sullivan, the
question is the door to the child's mind. Miss Sullivan never needlessly
belittled her ideas or expressions to suit the supposed state of the
child's intelligence. She urged every one to speak to Helen naturally,
to give her full sentences and intelligent ideas, never minding whether
Helen understood or not. Thus Miss Sullivan knew what so many people
do not understand, that after the first rudimentary definitions of
HAT, CUP, GO, SIT, the unit of language, as the child learns it, is the
sentence, which is also the unit of language in our adult experience.
We do not take in a sentence word by word, but as a whole. It is the
proposition, something predicated about something, that conveys an
idea. True, single words do suggest and express ideas; the child may
say simply "mamma" when he means "Where is mamma?" but he learns the
expression of the ideas that relate to mamma--he learns language--by
hearing complete sentences. And though Miss Sullivan did not force
grammatical completeness upon the first finger-lispings of her pupil,
yet when she herself repeated Helen's sentence, "mamma milk," she filled
out the construction, completed the child's ellipsis and said, "Mamma
will bring Helen some milk."
Thus Miss Sullivan was working out a natural method, which is so simple,
so lacking in artificial system, that her method seems rather to be a
destruction of method. It is doubtful if we should have heard of Helen
Keller if Miss Sullivan had not been where there were other children. By
watching them, she learned to treat her pupil as nearly as possible like
an ordinary child.
The manual alphabet was not the only means of presenting words to Helen
Keller's fingers. Books supplemented, perhaps equaled in importance the
manual alphabet, as a means of teaching language. Helen sat poring over
them before she could read, not at first for the story, but to find
words she knew; and the definition of new words which is implied in
their context, in their position with reference to words known, added to
Helen's vocabulary. Books are the storehouse of language, and any child,
whether deaf or not, if he has his attention attracted in any way to
printed pages, must learn. He learns not by reading what he understands,
but by reading and remembering words he does not understand. And though
perhaps few children will have as much precocious interest in books as
did Helen Keller, yet the natural curiosity of every healthy child may
be turned to printed pages, especially if the teacher is clever and
plays a word game as Miss Sullivan did. Helen Keller is supposed to
have a special aptitude for languages. It is true rather that she has a
special aptitude for thinking, and her leaning toward language is due to
the fact that language to her meant life. It was not a special subject,
like geography or arithmetic, but her way to outward things.
When at the age of fourteen she had had but a few lessons in German, she
read over the words of "Wilhelm Tell" and managed to get the story.
Of grammar she knew nothing and she cared nothing for it. She got the
language from the language itself, and this is, next to hearing the
language spoken, the way for any one to get a foreign tongue, more vital
and, in the end, easier than our schoolroom method of beginning with the
grammar. In the same way she played with Latin, learning not only from
the lessons her first Latin teacher gave her, but from going over and
over the words of a text, a game she played by herself.
Mr. John D. Wright, one of her teachers at the Wright-Humason School,
says in a letter to me:
"Often I found her, when she had a little leisure, sitting in her
favourite corner, in a chair whose arms supported the big volume
prepared for the blind, and passing her finger slowly over the lines of
Moliere's 'Le Medecin Malgre Lui,' chuckling to herself at the
comical situations and humorous lines. At that time her actual working
vocabulary in French was very small, but by using her judgment, as we
laughingly called the mental process, she could guess at the meanings
of the words and put the sense together much as a child puzzles out a
sliced object. The result was that in a few weeks she and I spent a most
hilarious hour one evening while she poured out to me the whole story,
dwelling with great gusto on its humour and sparkling wit. It was not a
lesson, but only one of her recreations."
So Helen Keller's aptitude for language is her whole mental aptitude,
turned to language because of its extraordinary value to her.
There have been many discussions of the question whether Helen Keller's
achievements are due to her natural ability or to the method by which
she was taught.
It is true that a teacher with ten times Miss Sullivan's genius could
not have made a pupil so remarkable as Helen Keller out of a child born
dull and mentally deficient. But it is also true that, with ten times
her native genius, Helen Keller could not have grown to what she is, if
she had not been excellently taught from the very start, and especially
at the start. And the fact remains that she was taught by a method of
teaching language to the deaf the essential principles of which are
clearly expressed in Miss Sullivan's letters, written while she was
discovering the method and putting it successfully into practice. And
it can be applied by any teacher to any healthy deaf child, and in
the broadest interpretation of the principles, can be applied to the
teaching of language of all kinds to all children.
In the many discussions of this question writers seem to throw us from
one horn to another of a dilemma--either a born genius in Helen Keller,
or a perfect method in the teacher. Both things may be true at once, and
there is another truth which makes the dilemma imperfect. Miss Sullivan
is a person of extraordinary power. Her method might not succeed so
completely in the hands of any one else. Miss Sullivan's vigorous,
original mind has lent much of its vitality to her pupil. If Miss Keller
is fond of language and not interested especially in mathematics, it is
not surprising to find Miss Sullivan's interests very similar. And this
does not mean that Miss Keller is unduly dependent on her teacher. It is
told of her that, as a child of eight, when some one tried to interfere
with her, she sat sober a few moments, and, when asked what was the
trouble, answered, "I am preparing to assert my independence." Such an
aggressive personality cannot grow up in mere dependence even under
the guidance of a will like Miss Sullivan's. But Miss Sullivan by her
"natural aptitude" has done for her pupil much that is not capable of
analysis and reduction to principle; she has given the inspiration which
is in all close friendship, and which rather develops than limits
the powers of either person. Moreover, if Miss Keller is a "marvel
of sweetness and goodness," if she has a love "of all things good and
beautiful," this implies something about the teacher who has lived with
her for sixteen years.
There is, then, a good deal that Miss Sullivan has done for Miss Keller
which no other teacher can do in just the same way for any one else. To
have another Helen Keller there must be another Miss Sullivan. To have
another, well-educated deaf and blind child, there need only be another
teacher, living under favourable conditions, among plenty of external
interests, unseparated from her pupil allowed to have a free hand, and
using as many as she needs of the principles which Miss Sullivan has
saved her the trouble of finding out for herself, modifying and adding
as she finds it necessary; and there must be a pupil in good health, of
good native powers, young enough not to have grown beyond recovery in
ignorance. Any deaf child or deaf and blind child in good health can be
taught. And the one to do it is the parent or the special teacher, not
the school. I know that this idea will be vigorously combated by those
who conduct schools for the deaf. To be sure, the deaf school is the
only thing possible for children educated by the State. But it is
evident that precisely what the deaf child needs to be taught is what
other children learn before they go to school at all. When Miss Sullivan
went out in the barnyard and picked up a little chicken and talked to
Helen about it, she was giving a kind of instruction impossible inside
four walls, and impossible with more than one pupil at a time.
Surely Dr. Howe is wrong when he says, "A teacher cannot be a child."
That is just what the teacher of the deaf child must be, a child ready
to play and romp, and interested in all childish things.
The temptation to discuss, solely in the light of Helen Keller, the
whole matter of educating the deaf is a dangerous one, and one which I
have not taken particular care to avoid, because my opinions are of no
authority and I have merely tried to suggest problems and reinforce some
of the main ideas expressed by Miss Sullivan, who is an authority. It is
a question whether Helen Keller's success has not led teachers to expect
too much of other children, and I know of deaf-blind children who are
dragged along by their teachers and friends, and become the subjects of
glowing reports, which are pathetically untrue, because one sees behind
the reports how the children are tugged at to bring them somewhere near
the exaggerated things that are said about them.
Let me sum up a few of the elements that made Helen Keller what she
is. In the first place she had nineteen months' experience of sight and
sound. This meant some mental development. She had inherited vigour of
body and mind. She expressed ideas in signs before she learned language.
Mrs. Keller writes me that before her illness Helen made signs for
everything, and her mother thought this habit the cause of her slowness
in learning to speak. After the illness, when they were dependent on
signs, Helen's tendency to gesture developed. How far she could receive
communications is hard to determine, but she knew much that was going
on around her. She recognized that others used their lips; she "saw" her
father reading a paper and when he laid it down she sat in his chair
and held the paper before her face. Her early rages were an unhappy
expression of the natural force of character which instruction was to
turn into trained and organized power.
It was, then, to a good subject that Miss Sullivan brought her
devotion and intelligence, and fearless willingness to experiment. Miss
Sullivan's methods were so good that even without the practical result,
any one would recognize the truth of the teacher's ideas. Miss Sullivan
has in addition a vigorous personality. And finally all the conditions