[il-talk] Fw: Helen Keller!

[Gina Falvo]

Debbie, that was a nice article about Helen Keller. She had a good life because of her teacher. she also had a lot of determination which keeps the rest of us going. 

Gina
 
> From: dkent5817 at worldnet.att.net
> To: il-talk at NFBnet.org
> Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:01:47 -0500
> Subject: [il-talk] Fw: Helen Keller!
> 
> 
> I found this a fascinating article and thought you might like to read it.
> 
> Debbie
> 
> 
> 
> The Truth about Helen Keller - Volume 17 No. 1 - Fall 2002 - Rethinking
> Schools Online
> 
> 
> 
> Children's books about Helen Keller distort her life
> 
> By Ruth Shagoury Hubbard
> 
> The "Helen Keller story" that is stamped in our collective consciousness
> freezes her in childhood; we remember her most vividly at age seven when her
> teacher, Annie Sullivan, connected her to language through a magical moment
> at the water pump. We learned little of her life beyond her teen years,
> except that she worked on behalf of the handicapped.
> 
> But there is much more to Helen Keller's history than a brilliant deaf and
> blind woman who surmounted incredible obstacles. Helen Keller was a
> socialist who believed she was able to overcome many of the difficulties in
> her life because of her class privilege - a privilege not shared by most of
> her blind or deaf contemporaries. "I owed my success partly to the
> advantages of my birth and environment," she said. " I have learned that the
> power to rise is not within the reach of everyone." More than an icon of
> American "can-do," Helen Keller was a tireless advocate of the poor and
> disenfranchised.
> 
> Helen Keller was someone who worked throughout her long life to achieve
> social change; she was an integral part of many important social movements
> in the 20th century. Her life story could serve as a fascinating example for
> children, but most picture books about Helen Keller are woefully silent
> about her life's work. It's time to start telling the truth about Helen
> Keller.
> 
> COVERT CENSORSHIP: PROMOTING THE INDIVIDUAL
> 
> "The world is moved not only by the mighty stories of heroes, but also by
> the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker."
> 
> Helen Keller
> 
> In the last decade, there has been a surge in literature for children that
> depicts people who have worked for social change. On a recent search for
> non-fiction picture books that tell the stories of those involved in social
> activism, I found scores of books - beautifully illustrated multicultural
> texts. Initially, I was delighted to be able to share these books with kids
> in my neighborhood and school. But as my collection grew, so did my
> frustration.
> 
> One problem with many of the books is that they stress the individual rather
> than the larger social movements in which they worked. In his critique of
> popular portrayals of the Rosa Parks story, educator and author Herb Kohl
> argues convincingly that her role in the Montgomery bus strike is framed
> again and again as that of a poor, tired seamstress acting out of personal
> frustration rather than as a community leader in an organized struggle
> against racism. [See "
> The Politics of Children's Literature," p. 37 in Rethinking Our Classrooms,
> Vol. I]
> 
> Picture books frame the stories of many other key community leaders and
> social activists in similar ways. Activist and educator Patrick Shannon's
> careful analysis of the underlying social message of books for young readers
> highlights this important finding: "Regardless of the genre type, the
> authors of these books promoted concern for self-development, personal
> emotions, self-reliance, privacy, and competition rather than concern for
> social development, service to community, cooperation toward shared goals,
> community, and mutual prosperity" (1988, p. 69).
> 
> I first became interested in the activist work of Helen Keller a few years
> ago when I read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your
> American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995). Loewen concludes that the way
> that Helen Keller's life story is turned into a "bland maxim" is lying by
> omission. When I turned to the many picture books written about her, I was
> discouraged to discover that books for young children retain that bland
> flavor, negating the power of her life work and the lessons she herself
> would hope people would take from it. Here is a woman who worked throughout
> her long life as a radical advocate for the poor, but she is depicted as a
> kind of saintly role model for people with handicaps.
> 
> THE IMAGE OF HELEN KELLER IN PICTURE BOOKS
> 
> For the purposes of this investigation, I chose six picture books published
> from 1965 through 1997, which are the most readily available from bookstores
> and websites. Four of the six covers depict the famous moment at the well
> where Annie, her teacher, spells "water" into Helen's hand. This clichéd
> moment is the climax of each book, just as it is in the movies made about
> her life. To most people, Helen remains frozen in time in her childhood.
> According to these picture books, she is to be remembered for two things
> after she grew up: her "courage" and her "work with the blind and deaf."
> 
> Young Helen Keller, Woman of Courage is typical. The first 29 pages bring us
> to Helen, age 12, who can read and write "and even speak." The last page,
> page 30, sums up the remaining 66 years of her life:
> 
> When Helen was 20, she did something that many people thought was
> impossible. She went to college. Annie went with her to help her study.
> Helen spent her life helping blind and deaf people. She gave speeches and
> wrote many books. Helen Keller died on June 1, 1968. But people all over the
> world still remember her courageous, helpful life.
> 
> But courage to do what? The statements that sum up her "courageous
> accomplishments" are ambiguous and confusing. "She gave speeches and wrote
> books." What were they about? What did she do that was so courageous?
> 
> None of the children's books I reviewed mentioned that in 1909 Helen Keller
> became a socialist and a suffragist - movements that framed most of her
> writing.
> "I felt the tide of opportunity rising and longed for a voice that would be
> equal to the urge sweeping me out into the world," she wrote.
> 
> Nor do those books tell readers that Helen Keller's publishing options
> dwindled because she wrote passionately for women's voting rights and
> against war and corporate domination. In order to promote the social justice
> she believed in, she decided she would take lessons to improve her speaking
> voice so that she could publicly speak out against injustice. This was true
> courage. Even after three years of daily work, her voice was uneven and
> difficult to control.
> Though she was embarrassed by her speaking voice and terrified of the
> crowds, Helen Keller boldly went on the lecture circuit. She later wrote
> that it felt as if she were going to her own hanging: "Terror invaded my
> flesh, my mind froze, my heart stopped beating. I kept repeating, 'What
> shall I do? What shall I do to calm this tumult within me?'"
> 
> The picture books omit the courage that took Helen Keller farther away from
> her home to visit povertystricken neighborhoods in New York City, where she
> witnessed the horror of the crowded, unhealthy living conditions in tenement
> buildings. Outraged about the child labor practices she encountered, she
> began to educate herself about efforts to organize unions and the violence
> that organizers and strikers faced. She wrote angry articles about the
> Ludlow Massacre, where, in an attempt to break a miners' strike, the
> Colorado National Guard shot 13 people and burned alive 11 children and two
> women. The Ludlow Mine belonged to the powerful millionaire John D.
> Rockefeller, and Rockefeller had paid the wages of the National Guard. When
> newspapers hesitated to publish her articles, Helen Keller spoke out
> publicly against Rockefeller: "I have followed, step by step, the
> developments in Colorado, where women and children have been ruthlessly
> slaughtered. Mr. Rockefeller is a monster of capitalism," she declared. "He
> gives charity in the same breath he permits the helpless workmen, their
> wives and children to be shot down."
> 
> Helen Keller was not afraid to ask tough, "impolite" questions: "Why in this
> land of great wealth is there great poverty?" she wrote in 1912. "Why [do]
> children toil in the mills while thousands of men cannot get work, why [do]
> women who do nothing have thousands of dollars a year to spend?"
> 
> This courage to speak out for what she believed in is also ignored in the
> picture book Helen Keller: Courage in the Dark. Here, her achievements are
> summed up on the final page:
> 
> Helen's story has been retold over and over. She has been the subject of
> books, plays, films, and television programs. The United States Postal
> Service has dedicated a stamp to her. And an organization with her name
> works to help blind people. Helen Keller's life was filled with silence and
> darkness. But she had the courage and determination to light her days. This
> is courage at its blandest - and most passive.
> 
> Notice that Helen herself is simply an icon - a "subject" of the media, the
> name behind an organization, and of course, best of all, an image on a
> stamp!
> 
> What a contrast to Helen Keller's own commitment to an active, productive
> life. When she wrote her autobiography in 1929, Keller declared, "I resolved
> that whatever role I did play in life, it would not be a passive one."
> Children don't learn that Helen Keller not only supported organizations to
> support blind people, she supported radical unions like the Industrial
> Workers of the World, becoming a Wobbly herself. Nor do they learn of her
> support for civil-rights organizations like the NAACP and that W.E.B. DuBois
> printed news of her financial donations and the text of her letter of
> support in the organization's publication. "Ashamed in my very soul, I
> behold in my beloved south-land the tears of those oppressed, those who must
> bring up their sons and daughters in bondage to be servants, because others
> have their fields and vineyards, and on the side of the oppressor is power."
> 
> The two best-selling picture books on Helen Keller listed at amazon.com are:
> A Picture Book of Helen Keller (Adler) and A Girl Named Helen Keller
> (Lundell). The theme of passive courage is at the center of both these books
> as well. At least in Lundell's book, Helen is credited with some action.
> After focusing on her childhood for 42 of the book's 44 pages, the author
> sums up Helen Keller's life with the following list:
> 
> In her life, Helen wrote 5 books. She traveled many places. She met kings
> and presidents. She spoke to groups of people around the world. Most of the
> work she did was to help people who were blind or deaf. She was a warm and
> caring person. People loved her in return. The life of Helen Keller brought
> hope to many.
> 
> Helen Keller herself would probably be horrified by this vague and
> misleading representation of her life's work. She spoke to groups of people
> around the world - ah, but what did she say? Lundell doesn't hint that she
> said things like, "The future of America rests on the leaders of 80 million
> working men and women and their children. To end the war and capitalism, all
> you need to do is straighten up and fold your arms." Lundell is equally
> vague about the content of her books, neglecting to mention essays such as
> "How I Became a Socialist"or books such as Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters,
> and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision (1913).
> 
> Lundell's synopsis of Keller's accomplishments focuses on the famous people
> - "kings and presidents" - who she met in her life. But at the core of her
> commitment was being part of work for political change with others, taking
> part in rallies, marches, meeting with friends to talk politics and to
> strategize. "I have never felt separated from my fellow men by the silent
> dark," she wrote. "Any sense of isolation is impossible since the doors of
> my heart were thrown open and the world came in." She showed that connection
> to her fellow workers in her actions again and again.
> 
> One fascinating example occurred in 1919, when Keller starred in
> Deliverance, a silent movie about her life. Helen supported the Actors
> Equity Union's strike by refusing to cross the picket line to attend the
> opening - and by joining a protest march with the striking actors.
> 
> David Adler's Picture Book of Helen Keller is the best-selling illustrated
> biography of Helen Keller for young readers. Like the other books I
> reviewed, this one focuses almost solely on her life before graduating from
> Radcliffe. The two important adult episodes Adler includes are her visits to
> blind soldiers during World War II and her work for the American Foundation
> for the Blind. The book ignores her phenomenal and productive life work as a
> writer and social activist. On the last page of the book, Adler sums up her
> life work: "Helen Keller couldn't see or hear, but for more than eighty
> years, she had always been busy. She read and wrote books. She learned how
> to swim and even how to ride a bicycle. She did many things well. But most
> of all, Helen Keller brought hope and love to millions of handicapped
> people."
> 
> Adler has space to note that Helen Keller learned to swim and ride a
> bicycle, but not to state that she helped found the American Civil Liberties
> Union or take on the medical establishment to change health care for
> infants. The inadequacy of the information in these books for children is
> staggering. Her life of hard work is reduced to the phrase "she had always
> been busy."
> 
> Children could also learn from Helen Keller's compassion and recommitment to
> pacifism after her visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1948. Deeply moved by
> the people she met and what they described to her, she wrote that the
> experience "scorched a deep scar" in her soul and that she was more than
> ever determined to fight against "the demons of atomic warfare ... and for
> peace."
> 
> WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS STORY?
> 
> "So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they
> compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'archpriestess of the sightless,'
> 'wonder woman,' and 'a modern miracle," Helen wrote to her friend Robert
> LaFollette, an early pacifist who ran for president as a third-party
> Progressive candidate in 1924. "But when it comes to a discussion of
> poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics - that the
> industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical
> deafness and blindness in the world - that is a different matter!"
> 
> While she was alive, Helen Keller fought against the media's tendency to put
> her on a pedestal as a "model" sweet, good-natured, handicapped person who
> overcame adversity. The American Foundation for the Blind depended on her as
> spokesperson, but some of its leaders were horrified by her activism. As
> Robert Irwin, the executive director of the foundation, wrote to one of the
> trustees, "Helen Keller's habit of playing around with Communists and
> near-Communists has long been a source of embarrassment to her conservative
> friends. Please advise!"
> 
> In the years since her death, her lifelong work as a social justice activist
> has continued to be swept under the rug. As her biographer Dorothy Herrmann
> concludes:
> 
> "Missing from her curriculum vitae are her militant socialism and the fact
> that she once had to be protected by six policemen from an admiring crowd of
> 2,000 people in New York after delivering a fiery speech protesting
> America's entry into World War I. The war, she told her audience, to
> thunderous applause, was a capitalist ploy to further enslave the workers.
> As in her lifetime, Helen Keller's public image remains one of an angelic,
> sexless, deaf-blind woman who is smelling a rose as she holds a Braille book
> open on her lap."
> 
> But why is her activism so consistently left out of her life stories?
> Stories such as this are perpetuated to fill a perceived need. The mythical
> Helen Keller creates a politically conservative moral lesson, one that
> stresses the ability of the individual to overcome personal adversity in a
> fair world. The lesson we are meant to learn seems to be: "Society is fine
> the way it is. Look at Helen Keller! Even though she was deaf and blind, she
> worked hard - with a smile on her face - and overcame her disabilities. She
> even met kings, queens, and Presidents, and is remembered for helping other
> handicapped people. So what do you have to complain about in this great
> nation of ours?"
> 
> This demeaning view of Helen Keller celebrates her in a way that keeps her
> in her place. She never gets to be an adult; rather she is framed as a
> grown-up child who overcame her handicap. Like other people with
> disabilities, Helen Keller deserves to be known for herself and not defined
> by her blindness or her deafness. She saw herself as a free and self-reliant
> person - as she wrote, "a human being with a mind of my own."
> 
> It's time to move beyond the distorted and dangerous Helen Keller myth,
> repeated in picture book after picture book. It's time to stop lying to
> children and go beyond Keller's childhood drama and share the remarkable
> story of her adult life and work. What finer lesson could children learn
> than the rewards of the kind of engaged life that Helen Keller lived as she
> worked with others toward a vision of a more just world?
> 
> Ruth Shagoury Hubbard (
> hubbard at lclark.edu.)
> teaches language arts and literacy courses at Lewis and Clark College in
> Portland, Ore.
> 
> HELEN KELLER CHRONOLOGY
> 
> David Adler's best-selling A Picture Book of Helen Keller includes an ending
> chronology, typical of the dates that other authors include about Helen
> Keller's life:
> 
> 1880 Born on June 27 in Tuscumbia, Alabama.
> 
> 1882 As a result of illness, became deaf and blind.
> 
> 1887 Met Anne Sullivan.
> 
> 1900 Entered Radcliffe College.
> 
> 1924 Began to work for the American Federation for the Blind.
> 
> 1936 Ann Sullivan died on October 20.
> 
> 1946 Visited injured soldiers.
> 
> 1964 Received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon
> Johnson.
> 
> 1968 Died on June 1. There are a few dates I would add to this chronology
> that highlight her lifelong commitment to social justice:
> 
> 1903 The Story of My Life is published - first in a series of articles in
> The Ladies' Home Journal, and then as a book.
> 
> 1907 Helen writes a groundbreaking article for The Ladies' Home Journal in
> an effort to prevent blindness among infants caused by the mother's venereal
> disease. (She rallies forces to convince the medical establishment to treat
> children's eyes at birth with a cleansing solution as a regular procedure.)
> 
> 1908 Publication of The World I Live In.
> 
> 1909 Becomes a socialist and a suffragist.
> 
> 1912 Publicly speaks out in favor of birth control, and in support of
> Margaret Sanger's work
> 
> 1914 Demonstrates with the Woman's Peace Party to call for peace in Europe;
> after the demonstration, she makes an impassioned speech for pacifism and
> socialism in crowded Carnegie Hall.
> 
> 1915 Writes articles publicly denouncing Rockefeller as a "monster of
> Capitalism," responsible for the Ludlow Massacre, (at his coal mine in
> Ludlow, Colorado) where men, women, and children were killed in a bloody
> confrontation between strikers and the militia.
> 
> 1916 Openly supports the Industrial Workers of the World.
> 
> 1917 Donates money to the National Association for the Advancement of
> Colored People (NAACP) and writes a supportive article in the NAACP Journal.
> 
> 1918 Helps found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for freedom of
> speech.
> 
> 1919 Stars in Deliverance, a silent movie about her life; supports Actors
> Equity Union's strike by refusing to cross the picket line to attend the
> opening.
> 
> 1924 Campaigns for Robert LaFollette, a Progressive running for president as
> a third-party candidate.
> 
> 1929 Publication of Midstream: My Later Life.
> 
> 1948 Visits "the black silent hole" that had once been Hiroshima and
> Nagasaki and recommits herself to the anti-war movement.
> 
> 1961 Suffers first stroke; retires from public life.
> 
> RESOURCES ON HELEN KELLER
> 
> Lawlor, Laurie. 2001. Helen Keller: Rebellious Spirit. (New York: Holiday
> House). A new biography for adolescents with excellent Photographs to
> document Keller's life.
> 
> Herrman, Dorothy. 1989. Helen Keller: A Life. (Chicago, Ill: University of
> Chicago Press). A fine recent biography that covers her adult life as well
> as her famous childhood.
> 
> Keller, Helen. 1929. Midstream: My Later Life. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday).
> Helen Keller's fascinating autobiography as an adult gives readers a taste
> of her writing voice, her passionate beliefs, and her social convictions.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> il-talk mailing list
> il-talk at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/il-talk_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for il-talk:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/il-talk_nfbnet.org/falvog%40hotmail.com

_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync.
http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_allup_1a_explore_042009