Get Woke, go broke!

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Get Woke, go broke!

I am well aware of what she accomplished and I knew something of her biography since my grade school days. However, my personal feeling is that part of what she accomplished was due to a patronizing attitude of people around her. "Oh, look. The blind and deaf person can actually do something." It's a variant of the virtue signalling we have today. Had Keller not existed, I don't believe anything would be different today. There were other people pushing the same social agenda she was and they likely would have gotten the same result in roughly the same timeframe.

Eliminate people like Gauss, Curie, Tesla, Newton, etc. and even if their accomplishments would have been done anyway, it would have been many decades later. Their contributions to society were far more singular and they as people were less fungible. And by the way, with the exception of Curie, nothing was ever taught about the lives of Gauss, Tesla, and Newton in primary school. I don't even recall much biographical information being taught of George Washington (the significance of his being an American Cincinnatus) or Thomas Jefferson (polymath) and I have an exceptional memory.

I am not for removing Keller from the history books. But the thing is, there are only so many things that can be taught in a primary school curriculum given the time constraints. Evidently, some new people are going to be studied and that means that some people have to be cut. The nature of Keller's contributions are such that a mere mention is not very useful (e.g., Calvin Coolidge was POTUS during the Roaring 20s is adequate enough for what Coolidge did). I think her history is only useful in class if her entire life is examined. That's probably at least three or more class days devoted to studying one person. That's what has to be weighed against whatever other people are being considered for study in a public school curriculum.

[shiny!]

Re: Get Woke, go broke!

I went to public school in Texas, too, and of the significant women in history that were discussed in my classes, I would argue Marie Curie is perhaps the one that made the greatest contribution to society, far moreso than Keller. If you're just talking about political figures, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, Mary Queen of Scots, Joan of Arc, and I guess Marie Antoinette come to mind. You did not read the works and at least mini biographies of Mary Shelley, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, or Emily Dickinson?

I did read their works in high school, but what I was getting at was that Helen Keller's biography is one of the only things I remember from elementary school. Her story had such an impact on me that of all the famous people we were given instruction on, she's the only one that readily comes to mind 50 years later. She was just an ordinary girl who overcame much to become an extraordinary woman. Contrary to the narrow range of career choices that the textbooks offered little girls, Keller showed me that girls could grow up to do a lot of different things.