“Helen’s experience of the world was shared and mediated through

the eyes, ears and language of others.”¹

Helen Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan brought before Helen “the greatest delight in the lofty, poetic language which we are too ready to think beyond children’s comprehension.”²  From the earliest days of Helen’s education, Anne Sulivan read books ranging from children’s novels as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy to classics as John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Helen has had the best and purest models in language constantly prepared for her… Her mind so filled with the beautiful thoughts and ideas of the great poets that nothing seems commonplace to her, for her imagination colors all life with its own rich hues.³

We are inspired by persons, whether they are adults or children, who make use of the beauty and wisdom they have come to know from great literature. One easily sees the imitative usefulness. Helen drank in language which she at first could not understand, and it remained in her mind until needed.

At Ambleside Schools the youngest children from kindergarten through high school are imitative in their telling back; each using the author’s language or inserting a word with the same meaning. The mind creates this mental framework, a schema for organizing and interpreting the text before them. The language which is read and narrated becomes one’s own. How might our children continue to grow?

We must address the children with an education which is fitting for them during these growing years. We must see children as persons who have a natural desire to know the history of his race and of his nation, what men and women thought in the past and are thinking now; the best thoughts of the best minds taking form as literature, and at its highest as poetry, or, as a child of God, whose supreme desire and glory it is to know his almighty Father: as a person of many parts and passions who must know how to use, care for, and discipline himself, body, mind and soul: as a person of many relationships, —to family, city, church, state, neighboring states, the world at large: as the inhabitant of a world full of beauty and interest, the features of which he must recognize and know how to name, and a world too, and a universe, whose every function of every part is ordered by laws which he must begin to know.⁴

Maryellen St Cyr

Director of Curriculum, Co-Founder

Ambleside Schools International

¹ The Story of My Life, Editor James Berger, 287.

² Anne Sullivan, 287.

³ IBID.

⁴ Mason, Charlotte, Towards a Philosophy of Education, (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1989) 106.