Helen Keller’s Teacher

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31042, 23 April 1966, Page 5

Helen Keller’s Teacher

(By DONALD McLEAN in the “Sydney Morning Herald”) ANNE Sullivan was born to an impoverished Irish family in Massachusetts on April 14,1866. Early in life she developed an eye disease that left her half blind. When she was eight her mother died and her father, an alcholic, deserted Anne and her tubercular younger brother Jimmy.

The authorities sent the children to Tewksbury Almshouse, where they existed among a snarling collection of syphilitics, prostitutes, drug addicts, cripples, epileptics, the insane and the aged. Three months after their arrival' Jimmy, aged seven, died in Anne’s arms, but for six more terrible years Anne lived in the almshouse, halfblind, untaught and yearning to go to school. From an old woman, a former prostitute, who used to read to her, she heard of the Perkins Institute for the blind. With the determination that marked her whole life Anne began pressing the almshouse trustees to send her to the Perkins Institute. This had been founded by a Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, who had made his name by teaching a deafblind girl, Laura Bridgman, to communicate by means of finger and hand signs. In 1880 (the year Helen Keller was born) Anne Sullivan arrived at Perkins to

begin her education. She began by learning the manual alphabet from Laura Bridgman, who never learned to cope with the world and spent most of her adult life at the institute.

A year later Anne’s sight was ’ restored by two operations carried out at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, but she stayed on at the Perkins Institute with the intention of becoming a teacher. The director of the Institute, Michael Anagnos, in his report of 1887 wrote of Miss Sullivan; “She was obliged to begin her education at the lowest and most elementary point, but she showed from the very start that she had the force and capacity which ensure success. She has finally reached the goal for which she strove so bravely. Miss Sullivan’s talents are of the highest order.” At 21 Anne Sullivan, described as having the eyes and mouth of an angel, was trained and ready for a challenge that was not long in coming.

In 1842 Charles Dickens had visited the Perkins Institute and written of the miracle that Dr. Samuel Howe had achieved by teaching Laura Bridgman to communicate with the world. More than 40 years later Mrs Keller, of Tuscumbia, Alabama, read the article in Dickens’ “American Notes” and urged her husband, Captain Arthur Keller, to see whether something similar could be done for their daughter Helen, who at the age of 19 months had lost her sight and hearing as the result of a sickness

Captain Keller consulted Dr. Alexander Graham Bell,

who advised him to write to Mr Anagnos. The rest is history. Mr Anagnos wrote to Anne Sullivan, asking if she would become Helen Keller’s governess, and it is typical of Anne’s thoroughness that she went back to the Perkins Institute to prepare herself for the position by reading the notes written by Dr. Howe as he taught Laura Bridgman.

By her unaided efforts, with only an elementary education to build on, Anne became one of the greatest teachers of her time, using methods well in advance of those used in schools of her day. She knew no classical or modern languages but she coached her pupil in Latin, French, Greek and German. Anne Sullivan never impressed her own mind or personality on to Helen Keller. She encouraged the child to think for berself and create her own ideas, essays and verse. As a result Helen Keller was the first blind-deaf student to graduate, from a university. The residential and school block which the Royal New South Wales Institution for Deaf and Blind Children is building at North Rocks will accommodate 12 blind-deaf children.

Misses Patricia Darnley and Rosalyn Jonas, teachers in the institution's school, are completing a training course at the Perkins Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, and Mr K. W. Watkins, principal of the School for the Blind, is visiting Perkins and other institutions in the United States to acquaint himself with methods of teaching the blind-deaf.

Many of the methods to be used in Australia were devised by Anne Sullivan to help Helen Keller. The two teachers training in the United States will return in July and it is hoped to have the scheme operating before the beginning of the third term.