Parenting & Family Quote by Anne Sullivan

Sullivan is quietly torching the cozy adult habit of “age-appropriate” deception. Her opening move - “It’s a great mistake, I think” - sounds polite, even tentative, but it’s a moral verdict dressed as mildness. The real argument arrives in the middle: children aren’t empty vessels to be managed; they are investigators. “Growing powers of observation and discrimination” frames childhood as a period of accelerating intelligence, not innocence, and it flips the usual hierarchy. The child is already collecting evidence. The adult who offers “falsehoods and nonsense” isn’t protecting them; they’re teaching them that questions are punished with flimsy stories.

The subtext is about trust as the central currency of education. Once a child detects the lie - and Sullivan’s point is that they will - the lesson isn’t the content of the lie but the contempt behind it: your curiosity is inconvenient, your perception can’t be honored. That’s how you produce either compliance (the kid who stops asking) or suspicion (the kid who assumes adults always have an agenda). Sullivan stakes out a third option: treat the child’s desire “to know about things” as legitimate, even when the subject is difficult, messy, or emotionally charged.

Context matters because Sullivan’s authority was earned in the most literal classroom of consequence: teaching Helen Keller, a student for whom language itself had to be built carefully, truthfully, from sensory reality. In that setting, “nonsense” isn’t harmless; it’s sabotage. Her line anticipates modern pedagogy’s respect for children’s competence, but it’s also a rebuke to adult comfort: the lie is often for us, not for them.