Page 364 - The Story of My Lif

on the “Juvenile Literature,” which belittles the language under pretense of being

simply phrased for children; as if a child’s book could not, like “Treasure Island”
or “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Jungle Book,” be in good style.

If Miss Sullivan wrote fine English, the beauty of Helen Keller’s style would, in
part, be explicable at once. But the extracts from Miss Sullivan’s letters and from
her reports, although they are clear and accurate, have not the beauty which

distinguishes Miss Keller’s English. Her service as a teacher of English is not to
be measured by her own skill in composition. The reason why she read to her
pupil so many good books is due, in some measure, to the fact that she had so
recently recovered her eyesight. When she became Helen Keller’s teacher she
was just awakening to the good things that are in books, from which she had
been shut out during her years of blindness.

In Captain Keller’s library she found excellent books, Lamb’s “Tales from
Shakespeare,” and better still Montaigne. After the first year or so of elementary
work she met her pupil on equal terms, and they read and enjoyed good books
together.

Besides the selection of good books, there is one other cause for Miss Keller’s
excellence in writing, for which Miss Sullivan deserves unlimited credit. That is
her tireless and unrelenting discipline, which is evident in all her work. She
never allowed her pupil to send off letters which contained offenses against taste,
but made her write them over until they were not only correct, but charming and
well phrased.

Any one who has tried to write knows what Miss Keller owes to the endless
practice which Miss Sullivan demanded of her. Let a teacher with a liking for
good style insist on a child’s writing a paragraph over and over again until it is
more than correct, and he will be training, even beyond his own power of
expression, the power of expression in the child.