Sinopsis
Among the curious was a government commissioner, who took the boy home and fed him. The child, who appeared to be about 12 years old, seemed ignorant of the civilized comforts that the people offered to him. When clothes were put on him, he tore them off. He would not eat meat, only raw potatoes, roots, and nuts. He rarely made a sound and seemed indifferent to human voices. In his report to the government, the commissioner concluded that the boy had lived alone since early childhood, “a stranger to social needs and practices. . . . [T]here is . . . something extraordinary in his behavior, which makes him seem close to the state of wild animals” (quoted in Lane, 1976, pp. 8–9).
The commissioner’s report caused a public sensation when it reached Paris. Newspapers hailed the child as the “Wild Boy of Aveyron.” In the climate that prevailed following the French Revolution, many hoped that the boy could rapidly develop intellectually and socially to demonstrate that even the poor and outcast of a society were as capable as the wealthy if they were provided with a proper education. The Wild Boy seemed a perfect test case because his life had been so devoid of supportive human contact.
Unfortunately, plans to study the Wild Boy soon ran into trouble. The first physicians to examine him concluded that he was mentally deficient and speculated that he had been put out to die by his parents for that reason. (In France in the late eighteenth century, as many as one in three normal children, and a greater percentage of abnormal children, were abandoned by their parents, usually because the family was too poor to support another child [Heywood, 2001].)
Most of the doctors recommended that the boy be placed in an asylum, but one young physician, Jean-Marc Itard (1774–1838), disputed the diagnosis of retardation. Itard proposed that the boy appeared to be mentally deficient only because he had been isolated from society and thereby prevented from developing normally. In support of his view, Itard argued that if the boy had been mentally retarded, he certainly could not have survived on his own in the forest.
Content
- The Study of Human Development
- Biocultural Foundations
- Prenatal Development and Birth
- The First Three Months
- Physical and Cognitive Development in Infancy
- Language Acquisition
- Physical and Cognitive Development of Early Childhood
- Social and Emotional Development in Early Childhood
- Contexts of Development
- Physical and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood
- School as a Context for Development
- Social and Emotional Development in Middle Childhood
- Physical and Cognitive Development in Adolescence
- Social and Emotional Development in Adolescence
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