Case Study: Helen Keller
Growing up in turn-of-the-century Alabama, Helen Keller met steep obstacles, as she lacked sight at birth, and lost any speaking or hearing function before her second birthday. Keller's extraordinary journey through higher education reflected a broader rebuke of Alexander Graham Bell's oral method and successes of oralism. Attending the Horace Mann School for deaf students, Keller leaned to use ASL and avoided oral method instruction due to the difficulties arising from her inability to process visual information. Later in life, Keller learned an adjunct 'oral method' in which she felt the speaker's lips as he or she spoke. Such skills, along with an acquired ability to produce speech in some instances, allowed Keller a glimpse into oralism. As the first deaf blind individual to attain a Bachelor of Arts degree, however, Keller understood the limitations of the Gilded Age soundscape and the manner in which one might move beyond the barriers of oralism. Conformity to the oral method would have stunted Keller's development, as ASL and braille prove more useful and empowering than any of Alexander Graham Bell's methods. Wealth and power, here, also enabled Keller's social mobility: without generous sponsorship from Standard Oil executive Henry H. Rodgers, Keller might have lacked access to educational resources essential for her intellectual development.
Driven by open access to deaf communities connected via ASL, Keller embarked on literary, political, and broader activist crusades. Experiencing the discrimination common against members of the deaf and blind communities, Keller reached out to those outside of those immediate communities, rousing Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, and numerous US presidents to her cause. Keller's engagement illustrates the social basis for the construction of oralism and its decay. A loose collective of interested individuals spurred on Hellen's success with ASL and with broader academic achievement. Without this attention outside of traditional community lines, Keller may have never engaged with the world in a full and complete manner. Keller's success, moreover, demonstrated that intelligence and an individual's capacity to see and hear are not correlated. Limiting deaf students' broader academic instruction, in an effort to teach the oral method, only perpetuates the specious notion of stunted intellectual capacity within the deaf community.
Driven by open access to deaf communities connected via ASL, Keller embarked on literary, political, and broader activist crusades. Experiencing the discrimination common against members of the deaf and blind communities, Keller reached out to those outside of those immediate communities, rousing Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, and numerous US presidents to her cause. Keller's engagement illustrates the social basis for the construction of oralism and its decay. A loose collective of interested individuals spurred on Hellen's success with ASL and with broader academic achievement. Without this attention outside of traditional community lines, Keller may have never engaged with the world in a full and complete manner. Keller's success, moreover, demonstrated that intelligence and an individual's capacity to see and hear are not correlated. Limiting deaf students' broader academic instruction, in an effort to teach the oral method, only perpetuates the specious notion of stunted intellectual capacity within the deaf community.