Social Education ImportantBy Helen Keller(Helen Keller, having been born blind, deaf and dumb, is not only remarkable in that she has mastered many things, including articulate speech, but also that out of her reading and observations of life, she is able to construct a philosophy obviously superior to that of the average human being with normal faculties. The following is from “The Modern Woman” in “The Metropolitan Magazine,” October, 1912.)
By Helen Keller
(Helen Keller, having been born blind, deaf and dumb, is not only remarkable in that she has mastered many things, including articulate speech, but also that out of her reading and observations of life, she is able to construct a philosophy obviously superior to that of the average human being with normal faculties. The following is from “The Modern Woman” in “The Metropolitan Magazine,” October, 1912.)
Social ignorance is at the bottom of our miseries, and if the function of education is to correct ignorance, social education is at this hour the most important kind of education.
The educated woman, then, is she who knows the social basis of her life, and of the lives of those whom she would help, her children, her employers, her employees, the beggar at her door, and her congressman at Washington....
It is for the American woman to know why millions are shut out from the full benefits of such education, art, and science as the race has thus farachieved. We women have to face questions that men alone have evidently not been able to solve....
We must educate ourselves and that without delay. We cannot wait longer for political economists to solve such vital problems as clean streets, decent houses, warm clothes, wholesome food, living wages, safeguarded mines and factories, honest public schools. These are our questions. Already women are speaking and speaking nobly, and men are speaking with us. To be sure, some men and some women are speaking against us; but their contest is with the spirit of life. Lot’s wife turned back; but she is an exception. It is proverbial that women get what they are bent on getting, and circumstances are driving them toward education.