H. P. Lovecraft wrote The Beast in the Cave when he was 14. You can find it here:
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/tex … on/bc.aspx

I'd intended to use that as an example that there are  instances of other young people from around the turn of the century that were good writers at young ages (I'm guessing from better education than we get at that age now) but that story wasn't published until 1918 so might have been changed from the version he wrote at 14. I found a bio of him here:
http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/biograph.aspx
that states he paraphrased the odyssey at  age 7 in an 88 line poem. Apparently  that poem is only in the book The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft but I couldn't find an accessible copy so can't speak to the quality of his writing at that age.

Look at political speeches from as far back as you can go and then compare them to the cespool of junk we have today.  People were expected to know more even as little as 20 years ago!

@hhurstseth405:
I hope I totally misunderstood your first post in this topic.
So, are you calling this nonsense, because you don't believe a 9 year old death blind girl is able to feel and write all this stuff?
Are you not caring about all the visual stuff like flowers, how the trees looks and how everything looks in generel because you are blind? If that's how you see the world, or rather, listen, smell and feel and exclude all the visual stuff because you can't see it, then I'll tell you that many other blind people are different.
I do care about all the visual stuff. I care about how things looks, how the weather changes things around me. I do care about the visual design etc.
If you think that deaf blind people don't do that as well, then I'll tell you that you're completely wrong. I train def blind people.
Helen Keller is born with normal sight and normal hearing, so she might have had an even better visual understanding than us who are born blind.
So, I'm sorry, but I don't get what you're trying to say in the first post...
I'm really sorry if I totally misunderstand all this...

A ton more!  Not too long ago, reading Robinhood was done entirely in old English by children!  You don't expect any 9 year olds today to know what thee thy and thou are.

Yes, 9 year olds are capable of that, and better. Notice how it seems kinda childish in some places, but poetic in others? And how she was writing about poetry? And how this was way before the 1970s, and all of her reading material would probably have been shorter classics. My writing style at 9 was less flowery and more influenced by Animorphs. I've read more impressive things from 9-year-olds. Low expectations are bad for everyone, not just blind people.
I am presently annoyed that the things I wrote when I was 9 are in a box in a storage trailer which is probably infested with mold rats and humidity. That is not where you store irreplaceable things made of paper!
But here's something I narrated when I was 7, which is simultaneously embarrassingly bad and stylized:

Most of the recording is like this--stuff that sounds like it came from a Victorian era children's book, mixed with the stupid-sounding stuff you'd expect.
It's also leagues better than the first recording I reached for, which was from a few months earlier and involved me throwing in random Power Rangers/Ninja Turtles/Planeteers references and technobabble and nonsensical combinations of words that sounded like they were supposed to mean something profound at the time. I'm actually kinda surprised by the skill gap, considering that these were in the same year. Practice makes a load of difference, apparently. And I'm pretty sure Hellen Keller practiced way, way more than me.

In Australia, all students must take standardised tests in spelling, grammar, punctuation, reading, writing and mathematics when they are aged approximately nine, eleven, thirteen and fifteen. The tests aren't used to show the intelligence of the students, but to compare teachers across different schools and in different areas. A report published recently shows that, although the level of difficulty of the tests remains the same from year to year, each year, the average results are dropping.

A child's ability to parse thoughts coherently is directly tied to the sorts of language and material around them.

Keller obviously had a high reading level at nine, so her ability to express herself linguistically was similarly advanced, plus of course, it's likely that reading and writing were her mane modes of expression, there not being too much by way of sign language around then. Though equally bare in mind there was a lot of shlock around then too, (they didn't call them penny dreadfuls for nothing), so undoubtedly Keller's coherence wasn't just a reflection of her time, she did actually have a brain (something I do approve of).

Low Expectations™ are bad for everyone. That is something out of one of the NFB's main slogans (paraphrased heavily, of course ), but it didn't stick with me because of their repeating it every chance they get. What really made it sink in was reading someone's account of living with low expectations for being female.
And, well, low expectations for children have bugged me since Y2K, only because I didn't really catch on before then.

I was hoping I'd saved the woman's story in my big file of quotes, but but while I was looking for it I found these instead: