Each answer is sweeping proof, all by itself, that the person uttering it was pushed ahead of where he belonged when he was put into history; proof that he had been put to the task of acquiring history before he had had a single lesson in the art of acquiring it, which is the equivalent of dumping a pupil into geometry before he has learned the progressive steps which lead up to it and make its acquirement possible.
Those Calcutta novices had no business with history.

There was no excuse for examining them in it, no excuse for exposing them and their teachers.
They were totally empty; there was nothing to "examine." Helen Keller has been dumb, stone deaf, and stone blind, ever since she was a little baby a year-and-a-half old; and now at sixteen years of age this miraculous creature, this wonder of all the ages, passes the Harvard University examination in Latin, German, French history, belles lettres, and such things, and does it brilliantly, too, not in a commonplace fashion.

She doesn't know merely things, she is splendidly familiar with the meanings of them.

When she writes an essay on a Shakespearean character, her English is fine and strong, her grasp of the subject is the grasp of one who knows, and her page is electric with light.

Has Miss Sullivan taught her by the methods of India and the American public school?
No, oh, no; for then she would be deafer and dumber and blinder than she was before.