Texas Ed Spectator

Textbook vote boots Henry, Sandra Cisneros

Board Republicans also removed United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta for proposed inclusion in third-grade textbooks as an example of someone who exemplified good citizenship.

Huerta is considered a civil-rights leader but Republican board members objected to her because of her past membership in the Democratic Socialists of America Party.

Helen Keller or Clara Barton would be better examples, said board member Geraldine “Tincy” Miller, R-Dallas.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Should I cry because board members believe that being a socialist automatically means you can not exemplify good citizenship? Or should I laugh because our board members believe that Helen Keller would be a better example, presumably because she wasn’t a socialist.

The Truth about Helen Keller – Volume 17 No. 1 – Fall 2002 – Rethinking Schools Online

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?

I guess we know what kind of education our board members received and what kind they they think is best for the children of Texas.

Texas State Board of Education, Geraldine Miller, Helen Keller