May 15, 1888.
Do you realize that this is the last letter I shall write to you for a long, long time? The next word that you receive from me will be in a yellow envelope, and it will tell you when we shall reach Boston. I am too happy to write letters; but I must tell you about our visit to Cincinnati.
We spent a delightful week with the "doctors." Dr. Keller met us in Memphis. Almost every one on the train was a physician, and Dr. Keller seemed to know them all. When we reached Cincinnati, we found the place full of doctors. There were several prominent Boston physicians among them. We stayed at the Burnet House. Everybody was delighted with Helen. All the learned men marveled at her intelligence and gaiety. There is something about her that attracts people. I think it is her joyous interest in everything and everybody.
Wherever she went she was the centre of interest. She was delighted with the orchestra at the hotel, and whenever the music began she danced round the room, hugging and kissing every one she happened to touch. Her happiness impressed all; nobody seemed to pity her. One gentleman said to Dr. Keller, "I have lived long and seen many happy faces; but I have never seen such a radiant face as this child's before to-night." Another said, "Damn me! but I'd give everything I own in the world to have that little girl always near me." But I haven't time to write all the pleasant things people said—they would make a very large book, and the kind things they did for us would fill another volume. Dr. Keller distributed the extracts from the report that Mr. Anagnos sent me, and he could have disposed of a thousand if he had had them. Do you remember Dr. Garcelon, who was Governor of Maine several years ago? He took us to drive one afternoon, and wanted to give Helen a doll; but she said: "I do not like too many children. Nancy is sick, and Adeline is cross, and Ida is very bad." We laughed until we cried, she was so serious about it. "What would you like, then?" asked the Doctor. "Some beautiful gloves to talk with," she answered. The Doctor was puzzled. He had never heard of "talking-gloves"; but I explained that she had seen a glove on which the alphabet was printed, and evidently thought they could be bought. I told him he could buy some gloves if he wished, and that I would have the alphabet stamped on them.
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, and talked to her without an interpreter. They were astonished at her command of language. Not a child in the school, they said, had anything like Helen's facility of expression, and some of them had been under instruction for two or three years. I was incredulous at first; but after I had watched the children at work for a couple of hours, I knew that what I had been told was true, and I wasn't surprised. In one room some little tots were standing before the blackboard, painfully constructing "simple sentences." A little girl had written: "I have a new dress. It is a pretty dress. My mamma made my pretty new dress. I love mamma." A curly-headed little boy was writing: "I have a large ball. I like to kick my large ball." When we entered the room, the children's attention was riveted on Helen. One of them pulled me by the sleeve and said, "Girl is blind." The teacher was writing on the blackboard: "The girl's name is Helen. She is deaf. She cannot see. We are very sorry." I said: "Why do you write those sentences on the board? Wouldn't the children understand if you talked to them about Helen?" The teacher said something about getting the correct construction, and continued to construct an exercise out of Helen. I asked her if the little girl who had written about the new dress was particularly pleased with her dress. "No," she replied, "I think not; but children learn better if they write about things that concern them personally." It seemed all so mechanical and difficult, my heart ached for the poor little children. Nobody thinks of making a hearing child say, "I have a pretty new dress," at the beginning. These children were older in years, it is true, than the baby who lisps, "Papa kiss baby—pretty," and fills out her meaning by pointing to her new dress; but their ability to understand and use language was no greater.
There was the same difficulty throughout the school. In every classroom I saw sentences on the blackboard, which evidently had been written to illustrate some grammatical rule, or for the purpose of using words that had previously been taught in the same, or in some other connection. This sort of thing may be necessary in some stages of education; but it isn't the way to acquire language. NOTHING, I THINK, CRUSHES THE CHILD'S IMPULSE TO TALK NATURALLY MORE EFFECTUALLY THAN THESE BLACKBOARD EXERCISES. The schoolroom is not the place to teach any young child language, least of all the deaf child. He must be kept as unconscious as the hearing child of the fact that he is learning words,AND HE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO PRATTLE ON HIS FINGERS, OR WITH HIS PENCIL, IN MONOSYLLABLES IF HE CHOOSES, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS HIS GROWING INTELLIGENCE DEMANDS THE SENTENCE. Language should not be associated in his mind with endless hours in school, with puzzling questions in grammar, or with anything that is an enemy to joy. But I must not get into the habit of criticizing other people's methods too severely. I may be as far from the straight road as they.
Miss Sullivan's second report brings the account down to October 1st, 1888.