Page 314 - The Story of My Lif

We lunched with Mr. Thayer (your former pastor) and his wife. He asked me

how I had taught Helen adjectives and the names of abstract ideas like goodness
and happiness. These same questions had been asked me a hundred times by the
learned doctors. It seems strange that people should marvel at what is really so
simple. Why, it is as easy to teach the name of an idea, if it is clearly formulated
in the child’s mind, as to teach the name of an object. It would indeed be a
herculean task to teach the words if the ideas did not already exist in the child’s
mind. If his experiences and observations hadn’t led him to the concepts,
SMALL, LARGE, GOOD, BAD, SWEET, SOUR, he would have nothing to
attach the word-tags to.

I, little ignorant I, found myself explaining to the wise men of the East and the
West such simple things as these: If you give a child something sweet, and he
wags his tongue and smacks his lips and looks pleased, he has a very definite
sensation; and if, every time he has this experience, he hears the word SWEET,
or has it spelled into his hand, he will quickly adopt this arbitrary sign for his
sensation. Likewise, if you put a bit of lemon on his tongue, he puckers up his
lips and tries to spit it out; and after he has had this experience a few times, if
you offer him a lemon, he shuts his mouth and makes faces, clearly indicating
that he remembers the unpleasant sensation. You label it SOUR, and he adopts
your symbol. If you had called these sensations respectively BLACK and
WHITE, he would have adopted them as readily; but he would mean by BLACK
and WHITE the same things that he means by SWEET and SOUR. In the same

way the child learns from many experiences to differentiate his feelings, and we
name them for him—GOOD, BAD, GENTLE, ROUGH, HAPPY, SAD. It is not
the word, but the capacity to experience the sensation that counts in his
education.

This extract from one of Miss Sullivan’s letters is added because it contains

interesting casual opinions stimulated by observing the methods of others.

We visited a little school for the deaf. We were very kindly received, and Helen
enjoyed meeting the children. Two of the teachers knew the manual alphabet,