MYSTERY OF HELEN KELLER

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20077, 6 April 1935, Page 12

MYSTERY OF HELEN KELLER

SOMETHING ABOUT HER TEACHER WHO WAS THE WOMAN WHO WORKED A MIRACLE? By whom was the mystery of Helen Keller’s terrible desirabilities solved? The reply is given in Nella Braddy’s “The Deliverer of Helen Keller: Anne Sullivan Macy” (Muller). Was Helen’s teacher a trained educationist? Was she taught by one who had studied all known methods of handling abnormal children? No, the solution was found by a young Irish woman, brought up as a ‘pauper’ in State institutions, never receiving much more than the rudiments of education, never encouraged to hope she could be more than a drudge. The Work of Anne Sullivan Anne Sullivan is a woman of seventy, now, worn by her struggles, almost blind, and it is only through the pages of this entrancing book that the world will learn something about the worker of the miracle—the teacher that rescued Helen Keller from a life of dull monotony which spread out before her, and transformed her from a little savage without manners or sense, into a human being of a very high type socially and intellectually as well. The author reveals how a child, blind, deaf and dumb, from the age of a year and a-half, became a woman famous the world over, an author, a university graduate, a lecturer, an actress even. Helen Keller is known the world over, but how little is known of the women who worked a miracle, Helen Keller’s teacher? New Philosophy of Education How did Anne draw out from her grievously hampered pupil the qualities which have shown so brightly in human affairs? She developed her own philosophy of education and the “product” of her system outshines the stars in the educational firmament of the world. Anne Sullivan soon “began to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education: “They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if a child is left to himself, he will think, more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and

combine all impressions for himself instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flowerpots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial association that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience. Must Interest the Child One of the secrets of Anne Sullivan’s success was that she treated her pupil

from the first as far as possible as if she were a normal child: “She has never made me feel,” is the testimony of Helen Keller herself, “that I was different from other people.” Thus she would “listen attentively to what Helen had to say even when (as was often the case), she disagreed with every word of it”; she encouraged the child, and then the young girl, and then the woman “to follow wherever her spirit bekoned, to develop herself according to the law of her own being and no other.” Either Anne Sullivan had a “natural gift” for teaching (if there can be said such a thing), or she thought about it far more deeply than other teachers. Many of her reflections are as applicable to the schooling of ordinary little boys and girls as to that of the afflicted. Anne Sullivan’s two fundamental principles of education processes were Freedom and Discipline, which might seem at first sight to be opposite. Here is how this educational miracle worker made them allies: “Freedom does not mean that a child should be allowed to grow like a weed or a barbarian. Nothing worth while is even.got without effort. lam thoroughly convinced that the child must not have forced upon him things he is not interested in because he is not ready for them. lam equally certain that learning must not be merely haphazard play. He must not nibble the sweets and leave out the substance. His nuts must not be cracked for him. Pulling up the Plants! In the last sentence and in this other maxim: “The true function of the teacher is to keep the child interested,” lie the whole philosophy of education. Here again is a piece of practical wisdom, not quite so easy to accept; but sound nevertheless. Slashing into the much discussed system of external examinations, Anne Sullivan reveals her hostility to the existing system: “I am convinced that the time spent by the teacher in digging out of the child what she has put into him, for the sake of satisfying herself that it has taken root is so much time thrown away. It is much better, I think, to assume the child is doing his part. Tribute to Miracle Worker The reviewers point out that Anne Sullivan would still have kept her unhappy girlhood hidden from the world save for the feeling that she ought not to hinder the publication of any good which would help to throw light on the mystery of her beloved Helen—for to most people the mystery remains; but to Anne there is the satisfaction of knowing that without her aid and her philosophy of education, Helen Keller might have become fairly intelligent, but out of her darkness and silence she could not have developed her mind and imagination, her courage and enterprise, her love of beauty and her noble sympathies as they blossomed and expanded under the care and guidance of Anne Sullivan.