Helen Selsdon

The True Meaning of the Value of Education by Helen Keller,The Home Magazine September 1934 It is September. Vacation time is over, and the children of the nation are going back to school. We spend more money on education than any other nation on earth. In the last thirty years the high school enrolment increased fifteen times as fast as the population, and our college students about seven times as rapidly. Yet thoughtful observers of our national life are appalled by the lack of culture…

Helen Keller was a voracious reader. She describes her love of reading in her second autobiography entitled Midstream, published in 1929. "More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free. Books are my compensation for the harms of fate. They give me a world for a lost world, and for mortals who have disappointed me they give me gods. I cannot take space to name here all the books that have enriched my life, but there…

Helen Keller loved the ocean, but her first swimming trip as a young girl took her by surprise... "My most vivid recollection of that summer is the ocean. I had always lived far inland and had never had so much as a whiff of salt air; but I had read in a big book called Our World a description of the ocean which filled me with wonder and an intense longing to touch the mighty sea and feel it roar. So my little heart leaped high with eager excitement when I knew that my wish ...was at last to…

Koala in a eucalyptus tree, courtesy of Harry Williamson By Maribel Steel and Helen Selsdon Helen Keller had an acute sense of smell. She loved being in nature and the fragrance of flowers. One scent she was particularly fond of was the fresh scent of eucalyptus leaves. "When I was in California, where the eucalyptus grows in magnificent groves, I used to stand among them with my fingers reveling, in the music of their leaves, inhaling their perfume with intense delight." Keller wrote this…

"Many persons have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." - Helen Keller In 1964 Helen Keller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Next week—on Tuesday June 17th—the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) will hold its annual Helen Keller Achievement Awards honoring those who continue Keller's extraordinary efforts to improve the lives of those…

Image: Helen Keller with children in Adelaide, Australia, 1948 The American Foundation for the Blind is committed to promoting the life and legacy of Helen Keller. We are the proud caretakers of her archival collection of over 80,000 items including documents, photographs, photograph albums, press clippings, scrapbooks, architectural drawings, artifacts and audio-video materials. The archives were first made available to researchers during the 1970s. Since then, historians, writers, film…

Laura Bridgman, photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Ever heard of Laura Bridgman? Bridgman is generally acknowledged as the first deaf-blind child to be successfully educated. Here's an interesting article from Slate about her life titled "The Education of Laura Bridgman. She was Helen Keller before Helen Keller. Then her mentor abandoned their studies." As I read the piece, excerpted from the book For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches From the World of the Blind by Rosemary Mahoney,…

This day in history (May 4th, 1897) New York City's five boroughs were consolidated. Helen Keller beautifully describes her love of the Big Apple in her 1929 biography "Midstream." Enjoy! I Go Adventuring Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream. In order to…

Today would have been Anne Sullivan Macy's 148th birthday. Let's honor her memory as Helen's beloved teacher and champion by supporting the Cogswell-Macy Act, which will provide equal resources and access to opportunity for children with vision loss or who are deaf/hard of hearing. Visit www.afb.org/CogswellMacyAct today for more information on the law and how you can help. Anne led an extraordinary life. Many are unaware of all that she overcame prior to being chosen by the Perkins School…