This story appeared in the Washington Post, by Haben Girma, a disability rights lawyer, author and public speaker.
I am Deaf-blind, and I almost missed my first lesson about Helen Keller. In second-grade U.S. history, my teacher scheduled Helen Keller’s story after a lesson in square-dancing. I remember my heart racing as I danced a do-si-do with my not-so-secret crush. So when our teacher told us about Keller, I was not-so-secretly distracted.
But throughout my schooling, snippets of Keller’s story would come back to me. I would turn to the nearest computer wondering: How did she . . . ? In high school, I finally read her books and marveled that she excelled in college before the Americans With Disabilities Act, before digital Braille and before, of course, the Internet. She pioneered through the world’s unknowns in a way that inspired me as I carved a path for myself. If my school hadn’t taught us about Keller, I might have do-si-do’d a different direction entirely. When I tell people about the path I did take — law studies at Harvard University and work as a disability rights advocate — they think back to their own lessons on Keller. Learning her story sparks something students carry with them into adulthood.
Last week, the Texas Board of Education took a step to remove Keller from the state’s social studies curriculum. The board preliminarily voted to update the K-12 curriculum by eliminating several historical figures, including Keller. Proponents said dropping the Keller lesson would save teachers 40 minutes. The board will make a final decision in November.
Spending 40 minutes annually to teach children about Keller is not just worthwhile but also imperative. The story serves as a gateway to conversations about disability and virtue. It introduces students to Braille, a tactile reading method that blind people have used since 1824. Children also learn about American Sign Language, a visual language developed by the Deaf community. Keller held her hand over another person’s to feel each letter as it was signed, then finger-spelled or voiced her response. She spent her life teaching people about the abilities of people with disabilities. She also advocated for women’s rights, racial equality and workers’ advancement. Keller wanted to make the world better for all of us.
Keller’s story provides an irreplaceable lifelong lesson of optimism, hard work and community inclusion. She labored over her studies, learning to read and write in multiple languages. She set high expectations for herself, gaining admission to Radcliffe College, the sister school to Harvard. Her teachers and friends converted books from print to Braille. She developed a community of friends and colleagues who welcomed her, finger-spelling and all. Successful people with disabilities such as Keller foster these inclusive communities. Disability itself is often not a barrier; the biggest barriers exist in the social, physical and digital environments.
People are dying waiting for disability. What’s taking so long?
In the last two years, nearly 19,000 Americans died waiting for disability. The wait has soared from around 350 days in 2012 to nearly 600 in 2017. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)
The techniques a Deaf-blind person uses to navigate those barriers in a sighted-hearing world fascinate students. Whenever I do presentations at schools, students express boundless curiosity about Keller’s story. How could she climb a tree? How did she read if she couldn’t see?
If Texas removes Keller’s story from the curriculum, when will non-disabled children learn about disability? Her story is too often the only disability story. Deleting Keller from the curriculum can mean deleting disability from the curriculum.
Of course, relying on a single story to represent the disability community is in itself a problem. The disability community is diverse, full of rich stories of talented people improving their communities. Students need to learn more about disability, not less. It touches all of our lives. Our bodies change as we age. Anyone can develop a disability at any point or witness a family member or friend do so. More than 57 million Americans have a disability. We number 1.3 billion worldwide — the largest minority group.
Teaching students about disability through the stories of people such as Keller prepares them to be better citizens, better friends and better family members. Keller’s optimism, hard work and commitment to justice inspire them to the same virtues.
Texas will make a final decision in November. We have time to educate the state’s Board of Education on the importance of keeping Keller in the curriculum. Keller herself would urge people to stay optimistic: “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope.”
Keller’s words have sparked movements in the past. Why not now?
Why is the Texas Board of Education determining the curriculum at this level of detail including the amount of time “saved” by removing Helen Keller…40 minutes! ????
The writer has every reason to be concerned and there are many good reasons for teaching all children about Keller’s remarkable life..
A White male, privileged, conservative will probably get the 40 min. of coverage instead of Keller- guys like Kavanaugh or Charles and David Koch.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The real reason for her removal is that she was an ardent Socialist – something that both sides tend to conveniently overlook when talking about her inspiring life.
yes
her views are not what the Texas textbook kings wish anyone else to hear
Could it be because Helen Keller was a democratic socialist?
From dailykos, 7-15-18: Helen Keller was a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World. But not just a member — she was an influential thought leader in the movement. In particular, she developed a disability politics grounded in Marxist theory. She wrote for the IWW, she was a prolific public speaker, she walked picket lines. She avidly supported the presidential campaigns of the person she considered her greatest hero, democratic socialist Eugene Debs, and remained outspoken in her leftist political views even during the Cold War period. She was also a leader in the struggle for women’s rights, and unlike some of her fellow socialists of the time, she was an outspoken opponent of racism in America. Keller was a co-founder of the ACLU. End quote
That’s what I think it is. It’s ideological purging. When I learned about her later, in more depth (after grade school) it was clear she was on the Left.
I don’;t mean that as a reason she SHOULD be purged, but I’d bet 100 dollars that is why she IS being purged.
Francis Bellamy was a Christian socialist who believed that Jesus’s teachings were socialistic.
Bellamy authored the Pledge of Allegiance:
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. (the original Pledge)
Ha, ha, ha, all those righty tighties who make a big deal out of reciting the Pledge don’t realize its socialistic origins.
Joe, thanks for this fresh reading of the Pledge. We fixate on “God” and think it’s right-wing propaganda. There’s more to it.
In my campaigning for Democrats, I tell “faith” voters that Dems are the true Christian party. Jesus talked about helping the poor, not abortion.
Link to the dailykos article:https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/7/15/1779636/-These-Revolutionary-Times-Helen-Keller-Socialist-and-Political-Activist
Our history will continue to be slanted toward the right wing as long as they are in a position of power. Helen Keller, a woman with disabilities, can be deleted along with Hillary Clinton because they represent a feminist perspective and social justice, ideologies the right wing would rather forget. Texas is ground zero for textbook content that is distributed all over the entire country, and what Texas decides has implications for everyone. If they really wanted to expose students to someone that had “true grit,” it would be Helen Keller.
This 8-y.o. article debunks as myth that Texas ideology dominates textbook publishing. Though once true, Texan influence was already then on the wane & expected to disappear as publ tech made it easier & cheaper to tweak core info to multiple regional druthers. Author also notes “controversional” textbk matl rarely affects text Q’s, as these are generally topics for discussion rather than “facts,” so do not lend themselves to mult-choice Q’s. However (article warns), it’s always easier/ cheaper to just leave out potentially controversial material, so the trend tends toward “boring” textbooks.
https://www.texastribune.org/2010/03/26/texas-textbooks-national-influence-is-a-myth/
The story about Texas textbooks is a half-truth.
Until the age of technology, Texas and California decided what went into textbooks. Publishers couldn’t customize textbooks for one state only. Since Texas was rightwing and California was leftwing, the publishers simply left out anything controversial. Every other state had to deal with it.
This continues to be the case, wherever textbooks are used. Now, however, there are more curriculum materials to draw upon, including online materials. And students have access to the Internet, which is not censored.
The AAP, which is quoted, likes to downplay the role of Texas because they represent the publishing industry. They have a vested interest in selling the boring texts that have been sanitized.
What is not mentioned in the article is that publishers religiously adhere to bias and sensitivity guidelines to help them avoid controversy.
I wrote about this in “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.” It is one of my favorite books, both funny and sad.
You would be amazed by the censorship, the words, phrases, and images that will never appear in a textbook or on a test.
And it is still true, no matter what that article says.
Thank you for your scholarship, Diane — I should have figured you wrote a book on that, but some how I missed it! Just ordered a copy.
So, and I’m not trying to start a fight- I’m really not- but if you oppose standards for education don’t you risk this stuff? Don’t you risk ideological purging of Helen Keller and Civil War histories that downplay slavery?
This is “local control” is it not? A unique and doctored history in Texas that excludes Helen Keller because she doesn’t fit with the current Right wing political fashions in that state?
We have kids here riding around with confederate flags on their trucks and their last name is on the Civil War memorial at the courthouse. Their relatives were Union soldiers. A Union Army supply road ran right thru this town. It was a main supply link. I mean, those guys must be rolling over in their graves.
How are state-imposed standards “local” control? I mean, more local than federal standards, of course, but they’re still not local. With the right-wing ambush at the federal level, what’s to prevent national standards from erasing Helen Keller? Then it’s pretty much a guarantee that all or the vast majority of kids will grow up without learning about Keller. If we abolish standards, schools and teachers are free to make their own decisions, and I think the chances are better that most will continue to chose to include Keller.
Yes. This.
“the chances are better that most will continue to chose to include Keller” – or not.
“If we abolish standards, schools and teachers are free to make their own decisions, and I think the chances are better that most will continue to chose to include Keller.” I was a Superintendent for 29 years in five different states… and I witnessed and heard about some school boards who might not be as open-minded and as enlightened in their choices. I believe all children need to understand climate change and evolution and I think they should be incorporated in standards if we hope to have an informed electorate going forward.
Standards – whether fed or state – are educational objectives; they are supposed to define what students should “[generally!] know and be able to do” at a certain stage [usually grade level]. “Standards” which are so granular that they resemble an exhaustive list of details to be learned — let alone dictating how many minutes are to be spent on each byte– have slopped over into curricular territory. You do not want national standards – or state standards – which list every historical figure to be covered.
But directly to your point, & here others may disagree… Federal imposition on state doings must be sparing. Especially when it comes to culture, & history ed touches directly on regional culture. Choose battles carefully when it comes to deciding whether a state’s ed stds meet the minimum reqt to avoid raising dunces, i.e., provide an adequate education. Because you can’t dictate culture. You can’t impose consciousness-raising more than an inch at a time, & even then only w/an eye to what people are ready to hear.
I do not equate local control with state standards. I equate local control with teachers being able to look at what other people think are important things to teach and evaluate them with regard to my own beliefs. This means at all high stakes testing must go, for a question on Helen Keller might mean that one student would gain an advantage on the test if he had encountered her before the test.
There is no way one idea should be favored over another by a curriculum.
So agree, Roy. YOU decide what to teach — within a rough framework described by standards — YOU test what YOU teach. Let the state SUGGEST content via standards, e.g., [just ad-libbing — not a history buff 😉 ] “students shall learn the sequence of events that resulted in writing the Declaration of Independence, be able to describe some key elements of the document, be able to name two or more signers.” The specifics of how you teach & assess that are up to you as a professional.
Why oh why do we have to belabor this self-evident process?
“Excelencia ended up at Sunrise because of a state law that allows charter schools to use available space — at cost — on public school campuses. Dozens of local charters take advantage of this opportunity. But this gunshot marriage of competing programs can be fraught, and tensions were exacerbated here because the neighborhood is saturated with old and new public schools during a time of steadily declining enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
It is by no means certain that both schools will attract enough students to survive, which makes some at Sunrise particularly bitter.”
Ed reformers are just great at this “governance” thing, I must say.
They set these school against one another and they’re eagerly cheering on the battle.
The people who live there lose, but what do they care? They’re “reinventing schools”!
Nice to be the designated collateral damage of their radical rewrite of what “public” means. Thye just plunk schools down anywhere and as for the public school kids? Who cares! The tech billionaires want “disruption”.
Their governance schemes are terrible. Designed by fad-following lightweights who don’t know anything about how these places work.
Helen Keller has been a terrific role model for sighted and for those who cannot see. Thanks for sharing this.
When my daughter was a little girl, we read her stories about Helen Keller. She instantly had a hero, so we plotted to take her to Tuscumbia, AL, about three hours south of us, to see The Miracle Worker, a play about Anne Sullivan, her tutor who was able to make a breakthrough to teach this apparently gifted human being. It was a stifling 95 degrees that June night when the play started at 9PM when it got dark. This followed the hottest day I ever saw inTennessee.
The audience was littered with little girls that were there because they too reacted at the age of four to this story about one of them. This illustrates why we should teach kids about heroes who are like them. When my daughter saw the pump where Sullivan pumped the water on Keller’s hands, you could tell she understood the story.
I suppose you might be able to choose a better story to show children the importance of realizing potential. But I cannot come up with it. The story is good for all kids, but especially inspirational for young girls.
I at age 11, one of those little girls you mention, read the book, soon after saw the movie, & re-read/ re-viewed both multiple times. The water-pump/ “Wah-wah” scene was the zenith; I expect each viewer took from it different things. For me, already a student of French (thanks to a Sputnik program in my grade school), the strongest connection/ impact was to language, & how it is learned.
But there were many layers in that play, particularly re: classicism & disability. Even at that age, I gleaned from costumes that the play took place in late-19thC. That era didn’t seem ancient in 1959; I was babysat in childhood by a great-aunt who grew up in Victorian times. So I was stricken by the flashbacks showing how the young [blind] Sullivan & her ill brother were consigned to a cave-like institution in the Ireland of not-that-long-ago. And ‘got’ the contrast to the wealthy southern home in which Anne was placed, & ‘got’ – again – that Helen would be worse off than a household slave of not-so-long-before… Unless she could learn how to communicate, she would be treated as little more than an animal.
Sorry, meant “classism.”
It would be too bad to have such a multi-layered ‘Famous Americans’ bio, w/ its trenchant message of overcoming seemingly unsurmountable obstacles, “deleted” from “Texas ed standards.” Especially ironic if it were done as a partisan strike against Keller’s later socialist leanings (which don’t even come into play in the segment of her life typically depicted in textbooks). But I say, let Texas get as provincial as they want to. It hurts them, but doesn’t really affect the rest of us.
I learned about Helen Keller when I was in grade school in Texas decades ago. No one ever mentioned her political views. She was a hero because she overcame her blindness.
“She was a hero because she overcame her blindness” – this is how you neutralize political opponent: not by suppressing all info about her, but by taking a glorified lopsided view. The real importance of Helen Keller is in her political views and actions not in her being blind.
BA, I disagree. First she overcame her double disability, then she expanded to ideas of how to structure, governmentally, help for similarly disabled. Yes, the 2nd half is instructive to all, but for warped-view states who censor/ truncate the rest of her life : their kids can still learn much from her initial struggle.
I think Virginia already removed her. What a shame! I will still talk about her.
I am old enough to remember seeing Helen Keller on television. She was an assistant inspiration figure even before I read The Miracle Worker and her autobiography, The Story of My Life. When looking for readable nonfiction books, hers is an excellent choice.
I’d like to know who made the “cut” to be included in the curriculum. I’m currently disgusted with our government which in the name of Making America Great Again are pushing back all the progress we have made over the last 50+ years.
She was an inspirational figure in my life and I continue to hold her in high regard.
Ditto. Those outside of Texas are free to continue to learn from her example. As to Texas, which dictates from state level which historical figures may [& may not] be granted 40 mins’ pubsch teaching per their warped agenda: karma. They seem to think it’s still the ’80’s when everyone was moving to Texas cuz livin was cheap & gas prices were high. The only millennials I know moving to Texas these days go to their lib-bubble [Austin], & move back soon as they’ve made enough to buy a place back home.
I’m so happy to see this story on this blog. I worked for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), the organization that Helen Keller was associated with for many years. I can tell you that Helen Keller is STILL an inspiration to many people. She was a strong advocate for human rights, for equal education for all children (e.g., she spoke out against the poor quality for black children at separate schools for the blind well before the civil rights era), and often wrote about the needs of disadvantaged people.
Please allow me to mention that AFB still maintains the Helen Keller archives which are being digitized. There’s actually a fund raiser right now to support this work, so if you’re interested here’s the link: https://www.afb.org/donate.aspx?action=fullform&type=archives&utm_source=email1&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button
I hope it’s OK that I mention this effort on this blog. Forgive me if I’m being inappropriate but it just made me so happy to read all your messages in support of keeping Keller in the curriculum. Thanks!
OMG. This information blows my mind.
While googling around about Texas influence on national textbooks, came across this interesting 2014 WaPo article relaying findings of a panel of Texas scholars on history/ geog/ socstud textbooks under consideration for state selection.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/12/proposed-texas-textbooks-are-inaccurate-biased-and-politicized-new-report-finds/?.%20%20%20%20.&utm_term=.66cda9601f1d
Specific passages are cited, along w/correction of historical misinterpretation. Some are blatant: denial of church-state separation; characterization of Muslim conversion [abroad] as violent but Christian conversion [in Americas] as benign; “terrorism” defined solely in context of Muslim fundamentalism.
Most common issue: broad attribution of Mosaic/ Solomon/ et al Judeo-Christian principles to devpt of democracy & Founders’ intents/ motivations.
Surprising to me: all these textbooks were from mainstream publishers.