Thesis Final Pages

A RECLAMATION OF THE EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT OF HELEN KELLER:
HER JOURNEY FROM NO-WORLD TO WORLD-HOME

Pam Whitty
University of Maine 1993

Who knows! If enough classrooms change, an entire school may be transformed. The idea of the Schoolhome includes major shifts in the way we think about - the way we define - teaching, learning, curriculum and the aims of education, as well as about life in classrooms. Is it possible in that safe and sealed off domain to bring new voices and perspectives into the course of study so that everyone will feel at home; to place at the center of the curriculum activities that integrate minds and bodies, heads and hearts, thought and action, reason and emotion; to make domesticity everyone's business? (Martin 209)

Suggestions for Future Reclamations

Martin and Keller have lots to say to each other and in the context of this study, the ingredients exist for what Martin might call an exhilarating conversation. A reclaimed conversation between Martin and Keller is one suggestion for further study. What might Keller have to say to the participants of Martin's conversation on the ideal of the educated woman? How does her reconstructed thought enlarge Martin's reclaimed conversation with Plato, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Beecher, and Perkins with a perspective sensitive to disability? Such a conversation reclaimed might provide insights of sensitivity to disability in philosophy of education. Briefly I provide an inkling of a conversation that might take place.

In some ways, it is an irony that Keller was so drawn to writings of Plato for in his utopia, the Republic, individuals such as Keller, those with considerable limitations of the body would not be considered educable. In Plato's just society those born deformed were to behidden away in "unspeakable and unseen places, as is seemly."(460c) Thus a sightless, soundless person such as Keller would have been considered uneducable for in Plato's just society the educational ideal for those with disabilities was an "ideal of hiddenness." I believe that Keller, in conversation with Plato, would inform him of the importance of the education of the inner senses regardless of physical limitations. Perhaps she might also suggest that education of her inner senses was even more crucial because of the limited availability of the outer senses and the difficulties she encountered in the dominant culture of the seeing and hearing. Plato's ideal of hiddenness is clearly insensitive to disability. In his just society Keller would have lived out her no-world existence in some unspeakable, unseeable place thus meeting with disappearance or in the extreme case of hiddenness, death. Keller would not have been restored to the companionship of the home-world, and gone out to explore her capacities in the public world and subsequently the world-home. The only world she would have known would have been the no-world.

Keller and Rousseau would concur with the importance of a same- sexed tutor and broadly with developmental notions of growth. However, it is likely that Keller would have found it less than ideal to wait until the age of 12 to learn to read for it was through "inner spelling" and ultimately reading and writing that Keller was able to join the community of book-friends. Thus in Keller's case waiting to learn to read would have been insensitive to disability.

What then might Keller have to say to Beecher who recommended an education in domestic science for women. In consideration of her essay about the modern woman of 1912, it is evident that Keller would regard Beecher's education as short-sighted lacking the power and vision of political action in the public world. In Keller's estimation, building moral character and fibre from the home-world, while being disenfranchised, was insufficient to change the nation and move toward creating a world-home ideal. Keller would view lack of political power as disabling to the creation of the world-home, for women would be constrained to the traditional home. However, directly related to her own conditions of communicative limitations Keller could attest to the importance of the mother, the primary teacher, and household routines in the early education of young children particularly in the case of a child not part of the seeing, hearing majority. Keller might also acknowledge the importance of keeping such a child within the context of a familiar world.

Where Beecher focussed on formal learning of skills needed for the home, Wollstonecraft wanted women to be given an opportunity to prove their "rational" thought. Keller would let Wollstonecraft know about the limitations of a "rational" education, one that did not prepare women or persons with disabilities for life outside of college. She would warn Wollstonecraft of the lack of connection between becoming "educated" and the circumstances of life. Where Keller saw this contradiction as an absurdity, Martin saw it as a disturbance. Doubly disturbing it was in Keller's case for she was subjected to gender insensitivity and disability-insensitivity in the alienating public terrain of the seeing and hearing. However, she could make Wollstonecraft and Martin's other conversational participants aware of the importance of the formal study of literature and philosophy in the development of both her inner senses and active humanitarianism through her life of use.

Reference to the inner senses brings this introductory conversation back around to Plato's utopia thus providing an opening in the conversation to another utopian vision - Gilman's Herlan. What might Keller say to Gilman about this land where motherhood was the cultural ideal and mothering, in one form or another, was practiced by all citizens of this utopia? In some ways Keller's world-home is best exemplified in Gilman's just society. Women are educating other women, the world is their home, lives of use are born out of special activities nurtured by mothers and teachers so that the all female citizenry may give service in Herland. However, the critical distinction between Herland and Keller's world-home is that persons with disabilities do not live there - the no-world does not exist, not a likely scenario in any present day society. Although medical technology may prevent the birth of infants with challenging differences, a moral issue in itself, in our lifetimes as we age, most of the population will undergo physical impairments of one kind or another.

Keller's is the first autobiographical narrative of a person with severe communicative disabilities. There are others such as Ruth Sienkeiwicz-Mercer in I Raise My Eyes to Say Yes, Temple Grandin in,Emergence: Labelled Autistic, and Donna Williams in Nobody Nowhere that could provide new insights into Martin's reclaimed conversation. These works could contribute to future conversations on what it means to become educated as a woman with severe communicative disabilities. At the same time works by men with severe communicative disabilities such as Christopher Brown in My Left Foot and Christopher Nolan in Under the Eye of the Clock could deepen our understanding of how both gender and disability may affect what it means to be an educated man. In the context of these narratives, educational differences and similarities with Keller's thought and experience could be considered particularly with exploration of Kelle r's world concepts, the four modes of her life and notions of educability, social integration and supported work.

In addition to studying other first person narratives written by individuals with severe communicative differences, closer examination of Keller's published work warrants further study. For example, in The World I Live In, Keller provides an extensive response to public critics about how she learned by use of the senses available to her. in My Religion, although about the teachings of Swedenborg, Keller has included her views of education. Keller was able to say what she believed in the context of Swedenborg's beliefs, beliefs she strongly identified with and which she practiced. In addition, Helen Keller's Journal written in 1936 in the six months immediately following Sullivan's death provides a very personal day to day perspective in Keller's adult life, not only of the difficulties encountered without Sullivan but also of how Keller combined the home and public worlds in the context of her continually evolving world-home ideal. Finally, although a lengthy task, it would be worthwhile to compare Keller's letters and private correspondence with her published works to further supplement or challenge the notions of Keller's worlds.

Given the critical role of Sullivan in Keller's education, it is important that further reclamation efforts include an examination of Anne Sullivan's letters to Mrs. Sophia Hopkins. These letters appear in text of the first edition as well as the 1954 Doubleday edition of The Story of My Life. Sullivan's letters provide rich descriptions of her teaching approach with Keller from the perspective of the teacher and thus lend another perspective to the conversation begun by Susan Laird on the ideal of the educated teacher. Sullivan destroyed her own personal diary however, her letters could be read in conjunction with Nelia Brady's biography entitled Anne Sullivan Macy written in 1933 and Keller's writings.

Helen Keller's published works have influenced my thought and opened visions of world-making I had not previously considered. I trust Keller's thought, love, action and communication may provide insight into conversations about education for all individuals in a variety of educational settings including the no-world, the home-world, the public world and the evolving world-home. I further trust that individuals will make decisions that affirm the right of self and others, and find in Keller's work words which speak to them. Because we live in constantly shifting worlds we, as educators, must constantly shift our understanding of how individuals can be brought to the recognition and fulfilment of their capacities. In light of Keller's ideal, I close this study with her words - words that provide an opening for us to continue.

The world which my imagination constructs out of my philosophy of evolution is pleasant to contemplate. It is a realization of everything that seems desirable to us in our best moods, and the people who live in it are like those we sometimes meet whose nobility is a prophecy of what we shall be when we have reached the state in which the different parts of our bodies and souls, our hearts and minds, have attained their right proportions. This state will not be achieved without tribulation. (Midstream 337)