HELEN KELLER AND HER TEACHER

A great wonder was the marvelous manner in which Helen Keller, the blind-deaf girl, had been rendered able to take her place in classes in Radcliff College at Harvard University and to win a distinguished place for scholarship. This was possible only through the patient and faithful 49-year ministry of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. The latter found her as a little girl utterly unable to comprehend the life about her and only able to make the crudest communications by signs to her family. The teacher, by patient persistence, using all sorts of objects, with infinite pains, taught the little girl the sign language by touch, and when once communication with the outside world was thus established, education and scholarship proceeded. Anne became Helen’s other half.

Then time came when misfortune befell Anne Sullivan: she became blind. And now, in a turn-about, Helen patiently taught Anne how to overcome the lack of sight. She schooled her former teacher as devotedly as she herself had been schooled. Finally Helen Keller stood at the deathbed of her other half – a lifetime of mutual, patient devotion coming to an end. When it was all over, she said: “I pray for strength to endure the silent dark until she smiles upon me again.”

[Adaptd with permission from Encylopedia of 7700 Illustrations, by Paul Lee Tan,
Assurance Publishers, Rockville, MD, 1984. #1794 and 6416]

[Editor’s note: Helen Keller (1880-1968), one of the world’s renowned women, was a prodigy who lived and became renown without sight or hearing. Having lost her sight and hearing during a childhood disease at age two, Helen was blessed at seven to have Anne Sullivan enter her life as teacher and companion. For the next forty nine years the two were inseparable, as Anne taught her to read, translate for her in classes and with audiences, and assist Helen with life. Helen enrolled and graduated from Radcliffe with honors, published three books, and spent much of her life lecturing on women’s rights, pacifism, and how to help the blind and deaf. She worked to make Braille, a raised form of writing, the standard for printed communication with the blind.]

This material is published by the Faith Committee of the Character Council of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky. Reproduction and Adaptation is encouraged.