How Lincoln Learned to Read by Daniel Wolff

Author:Daniel Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-10-30T04:00:00+00:00

HELEN

It’s a classic American moment, a classic moment in American education.

Helen Keller and her teacher are standing by the water pump; Helen can’t speak, or see, or hear. Teacher (Annie Sullivan) signs W-A-T-W-R, Helen feels the cool flow on her hand, and . . . bang!

“That living word,” is how Helen describes it, “awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” In Teacher’s version: “She . . . stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her face.” In both cases, it’s light into darkness: the rush of learning.

It’s powerful partly because of Helen’s handicaps—an against-all-odds awakening—but it’s also a gorgeous, condensed version of how education is supposed to work. Learning stripped to its essentials: a teacher, a student, and the need to know. Don’t we send kids to school for something like this—maybe a less extreme version, less dramatic, but the same bang as a new world opens? It’s a miracle, complete with miracle worker.

Helen was almost seven when it happened, the age of a second grader. She’d been born with all her senses, contracted a fever when she was a year and a half, and then, in her words, “Gradually I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me.” But she never got used to the frustration. “Nothing,” as she described it, “was part of anything.” Then, Teacher arrived, and a little over a month later, Helen was out by the pump. “Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. Everything had a name and each name gave birth to a new thought.”

The miracle is language. It lets her name things. And names let her begin to think, to consider how one thing relates to the next. And that connects her to the world. “As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.” Teacher says Helen learned thirty words in the next few hours, had a hundred within ten days, four hundred in less than three months. Knowledge pours in.

But wait. The way Helen and her teacher describe it, it’s more like knowledge gushes out. She’s forgotten what she needs to know; now it wells up from within. Teacher says the speed Helen learns “suggests the waking from a dream.”

Before Teacher arrived, Helen had known a few basic signs: mother, father, ice cream, cake. She could communicate, if crudely. Teacher believed language was in the girl, latent but blocked. That’s why she saw the moment by the pump as the second step in Helen’s education. When Anne Sullivan writes a friend, “A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil’s mind, and behold, all things are changed!” the letter’s dated two weeks before W-A-T-E-R.

What’s the earlier miracle? Within a week of arriving, Teacher decided that the first thing Helen needed to know was her place. At dinner, the girl was used to circling the table, eating randomly off plates, making a mess.

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