Anne Sullivan
Anne Sullivan
Johanna "Anne" Mansfield Sullivan Macy, better known as Anne Sullivan, was an American teacher, best known for being the instructor and lifelong companion of Helen Keller. At the age of five, she contracted trachoma, a highly contagious eye disease, which left her blind and without reading or writing skills. She received her education as a student of the Perkins School for the Blind where upon graduation she became a teacher to Keller when she was 20...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTeacher
Date of Birth14 April 1866
CountryUnited States of America
Anne Sullivan quotes about
Certain periods in history suddenly lift humanity to an observation point where a clear light falls upon a world previously dark.
It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.
Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.
People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.
Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences...Language and knowledge are indissolubly connected; they are interdependent. Good work in language presupposes and depends on a real knowledge of things.
Obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.
Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
The processes of teaching the child that everything cannot be as he wills it are apt to be painful both to him and to his teacher.
You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play.
It is a rare privilege to watch the birth, growth, and first feeble struggles of a living mind; this privilege is mine.
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better , if less "showily." Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.
My heart is singing for joy this morning! A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed!
Education in the light of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in the substance and the purpose of current pedagogy.
I think that some people look at the school and take it as their school, and other people look at it as not their school, like it belongs to the town, ... But it varies. I don't want to say 'in all instances.' We've had valedictorians, salutatorians that are native students, so not everybody pushes it away.