Page 347 - The Story of My Lif

own rich hues.

There has been much discussion of such of Miss Sullivan’s statements and
explanations as have been published before. Too much has been written by
people who do not know the problems of the deaf at first hand, and I do not care
to add much to it. Miss Keller’s education, however, is so fundamentally a
question of language teaching that it rather includes the problems of the deaf

than limits itself to the deaf alone. Teachers can draw their own conclusions. For
the majority of readers, who will not approach Miss Keller’s life from the
educator’s point of view, I will summarize a few principal things in Miss
Sullivan’s methods.

Miss Sullivan has begun where Dr. Howe left off. He invented the instrument,

the physical means of working, but the teaching of language is quite another
thing from the mechanical means by which language may be taught. By
experiment, by studying other children, Miss Sullivan came upon the practical
way of teaching language by the natural method. It was for this “natural method”

that Dr. Howe was groping, but he never got to this idea, that a deaf child should
not be taught each word separately by definition, but should be given language
by endless repetition of language which it does not understand. And this is Miss
Sullivan’s great discovery. All day long in their play-time and work-time Miss
Sullivan kept spelling into her pupil’s hand, and by that Helen Keller absorbed
words, just as the child in the cradle absorbs words by hearing thousands of them
before he uses one and by associating the words with the occasion of their
utterance. Thus he learns that words name things and actions and feelings. Now,
that is the first 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