Before Helen Keller, There Was Laura Bridgman

Helen Keller was famous for her writing and advocacy, but she was not the first person to receive an education despite being both blind and deaf. The first was Laura Bridgman, who was born in 1829, over 50 years before Keller. Bridgman lost her sight and hearing at the age of two. When she was seven, she was brought to the attention of educator Samuel Gridley Howe, who founded the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. Howe was determined to teach Bridgman to communicate with words.

Having accomplished that seemingly impossible task of learning words before letters, Bridgman eventually became proficient in language. But her education was uneven—despite being able to, say, point out a distant country on a globe, she was kept from learning about much of the world around her. Howe focused on abstract knowledge more than real-world experiences and used the glittering success of Bridgman’s education as a kind of proof of the validity of his educational theories. Howe, who was against rote learning and espoused liberal religious views, seems to have thought that Bridgman was a kind of specimen of pure humanity, unsullied by the vagaries of the world. Indeed, writes Freeberg, Howe wrote of her as “perfectly holy” and “as pure as Eve.”

But Bridgman had her own ideas about that. Once someone learns to communicate and read, it's impossible to control what they learn. Read about Laura Bridgman at Jstor Daily.