Wrong about Helen Keller...

An email from a reader tells me "Your facts about Helen Keller are wrong. She did have speech! So why bring her up?"

Helen Keller was born a normal baby. By the time she was 19 months old, she was very ill and not expected to survive. Some today think that she may have had scarlet fever or meningitis. It was soon discovered that she was deaf, blind, and she did not have speech.

The family sought help for Helen when she was about 6 years old, and Annie Sullivan came into her life. Before Ms. Sullivan could teach Helen, she had to tame Helen's wild ways. Speech was not an early part of her training; Ms. Sullivan used her fingers to spell out words into Helen's hands.

When Helen was 9 or 10 years old, she and Annie Sullivan went to live at the Perkins Institution, where Annie Sullivan had had her training. Mary Swift Lamson attempted to teach Helen to speak, but Helen never attained normal speech. The following link says "This was something that Helen desperately wanted and although she learned to understand what somebody else was saying by touching their lips and throat, her efforts to speak herself proved at this stage to be unsuccessful. This was later attributed to the fact that Helen’s vocal chords were not properly trained prior to her being taught to speak."

article: The Life of Helen Keller

Now what I wonder is, why does it matter if Helen spoke or not in later life? The fact remains, Helen was wild, spoiled, and undisciplined. She had to first be civilized before she could be taught anything. The same with many kids today. Many teachers write that they can't teach because they first have to first teach manners, teach kids to sit quietly and listen, to take direction from an adult. They have to teach them to enter a room quietly.

If Helen Keller, with three handicaps, can be civilized, why can't today's children be civilized? I remember sitting in a park some years ago listening to a mother go on and on about how gifted her kid was, how he was a champ in everything he did. As she spoke, His Giftedness was bullying the younger kids on the playground and letting air out of bike tires. He may have been gifted. But he was an ill-mannered brat.