How we learn [antikvár]

The Role of KnowledgeAt the turn of the 19th Century, swarms of sightseers converged on Paris to see what was heralded as the oddity of the eraa supposedly wild boy, half-human, half-animal, who had been captured in the woods of Aveyron in southern France. They came, it was said, not just to stare at a freak but to see what happens when a human being is removed from civilization at birth and left to survive only on his wits and the nuts and berries he can find. Would he prove to be the "noble savage" of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose back-to-nature philosophy was still widely debated in France, or would he be something else?For those who expected to see a delightfully natural youth the sight was a shock. The boy, it was reported, "was a degraded being, human only in shape; a dirty, scared, inarticulate creature, who trotted and grunted like the beasts of the fields, ate with apparent pleasure the most filthy refuse, was apparently incapable of attention or even of elementary perceptions such as heat or cold, and spent his time apathetically rocking himself backwards and forwards, like the animals at the zoo."The Wild Boy of Aveyron, as he came to be known, might have been quickly forgotten had he not come to the attention of Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a young French doctor who patiently devoted the next five years to teaching him the rudiments of civilized life. Itard named the youth Victor and developed ingenious techniques for his educationtechniques, incidentally, that were subsequently adapted to the education of deaf mutes and the feeble-mindedbut his efforts with Victo^- ended largely in frustration. The Wild Boy managed to dress himself and to learn a few commands, but his language comprised only a few syllables.Whether the Wild Boy of Aveyron was truly wild or simply a retarded child who had become lost does not matter. He was unable to learn the way children the world over do, informally in their homes and formally in classrooms such as the Indian one shown at left, and so he remained largely an animal, lacking the essential qualities that distinguish civilized man from all other creatures.Men are born with only a few innate aljilities, the most obvious one being the reflex of sucking that enables the infant to gain nourishment. Almost everything else that makes a human being human is learned behavior, from the motor ability to walk fully erect to the complex nervous and mus-7