The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert MacyKeller, Helen
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The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy
Keller, Helen
Deafblind women -- United States -- Biography; Keller, Helen, 1880-1968
Surrounded by loving friends and the gentlest influences, as Helen
had always been, she has, from the earliest stage of her intellectual
enlightenment, willingly done right. She knows with unerring instinct
what is right, and does it joyously. She does not think of one wrong
act as harmless, of another as of no consequence, and of another as not
intended. To her pure soul all evil is equally unlovely.
These passages from the paper Miss Sullivan prepared for the meeting at
Chautauqua, in July, 1894, of the American Association to Promote the
Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, contain her latest written account of
her methods.
You must not imagine that as soon as Helen grasped the idea that
everything had a name she at once became mistress of the treasury of
the English language, or that "her mental faculties emerged, full armed,
from their then living tomb, as Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus,"
as one of her enthusiastic admirers would have us believe. At first, the
words, phrases and sentences which she used in expressing her thoughts
were all reproductions of what we had used in conversation with her, and
which her memory had unconsciously retained. And indeed, this is true
of the language of all children. Their language is the memory of the
language they hear spoken in their homes. Countless repetition of the
conversation of daily life has impressed certain words and phrases upon
their memories, and when they come to talk themselves, memory supplies
the words they lisp. Likewise, the language of educated people is the
memory of the language of books.
Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences. At first
my little pupil's mind was all but vacant. She had been living in a
world she could not realize. LANGUAGE and KNOWLEDGE are indissolubly
connected; they are interdependent. Good work in language presupposes
and depends on a real knowledge of things. As soon as Helen grasped
the idea that everything had a name, and that by means of the manual
alphabet these names could be transmitted from one to another, I
proceeded to awaken her further interest in the OBJECTS whose names she
learned to spell with such evident joy. I NEVER TAUGHT LANGUAGE FOR THE
PURPOSE OF TEACHING IT; but invariably used language as a medium for the
communication of THOUGHT; thus the learning of language was
COINCIDENT with the acquisition of knowledge. In order to use language
intelligently, one must have something to talk ABOUT, and having
something to talk about is the result of having had experiences; no
amount of language training will enable our little children to use
language with ease and fluency unless they have something clearly in
their minds which they wish to communicate, or unless we succeed in
awakening in them a desire to know what is in the minds of others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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