I read the play years ago and as I remember some of the family dialogue is cut from the film. On the other hand, all the dialogue in the film is also in the play. I remember in particular that the family grace about wrestling with the angel, ending with James saying "oh, you angel" to the "new and improved" Helen (with table manners) is straight from the theater script.
I wish I recalled the dialogue in the part you're asking about more clearly. The fight in the dining room is so direct and physical, and I was still involved in it, wanting to know how it was turning out. When the film switched to the porch scene, I was unwilling to listen to dialogue that was (to me) self-conciously high-flown. But as the previous poster says, most of it did turn on the idea of a dinner napkin turning into a white flag. Helen's father has stormed out of the room and is about to go to the office, fuming that it's ridiculous to ask that his daughter fold a dinner napkin. His wife gently points out that HE hasn't folded his own dinner napkin, which is still tucked into his collar and hanging down his shirt. He yanks it off, gives it to her, and leaves.
When his father is gone, James says the napkin may as well be his flag of surrender. And (as usual) his tone is so smug, and implicitly critical of everyone else's weakness regarding Helen, that Mrs. Keller asks him if perhaps Helen wouldn't defeat James too, and he might need the white flag as well.
The remark by James, "Will you teach me too?" --
As another poster wrote, James is passive aggressive. He mistakes his own sarcasm for intelligence. He's been watching Helen spelling words into a dog's paw. He tells Anne that Helen doesn't understand that the words have meaning any more than the dog does. She answers that a breakthrough is bound to happen sometime, just as it does with an infant child. But to James, Anne's effort is implicitly stupid. He then asks Anne if she will teach him too -- challenging her, really, and implying that that Anne is deluded if she thinks can change his mind, just as Helen is deluded in her actions with the dog. Understandably, Anne closes the window in his face.
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