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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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