The Wild Boy of Aveyron

by Harlan Lane

The discovery of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, and the accomplishments of his teacher, Jean Marc Itard, launched a debate among philosophers anthropologists, psychologists, and educators that has lasted almost two centuries, has given birth to educational treatment of the mentally retarded with methods that are still widely employed, and has led in this country to a revolution in childhood education.

This beautifully written book by Harlan Lane tells the complete story of Dr. Itard's successes and failures with “l'enfant sauvage,” a story immortalized by director François Truffaut in The Wild Child ( L'Enfant sauvage ). Lane takes the reader into the central philosophical and scientific debates of the nineteenth century and sheds new light on questions that persist for our own time. Which human activities require social instruction and which do not? Is there a critical period for language acquisition? To what extent can education compensate for delayed development and limited endowment? What are the critical features of effective training methods?

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History, Psychology

366 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1976

About the author

Harlan Lane is a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University. His research focuses on speech production and perception in hearing and deaf people and on the culture, history and manual language of the deaf world.

--from the author's website

Reviews

[Jacqui · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading this for school and didn’t expect to like it — it seemed like it would be a slog to get through. But it was unexpectedly brilliant and tied together a lot of things I’ve thought and wondered about Applied Behavior Analysis and Deaf people and education. Absolutely worth the read.

[Vicki Gooding · Rating 4 out of 5]

A unique account of a boy back in the late 1700's, running around naked in the wild, left to his own devices without any known parents. They did not know who he was, or where he came from. They guessed his age to be about 12, both deaf and mute and named him Victor. The whole book revolves around the doctor who took him in. Raised him as a son, and worked with him on language, learning, social skills. An amazing and remarkable story of a boy retarded of his humanity by being left in the wild, and then careful day by day intimate training.

[Kyla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book. It told the life and story of the wild boy of Aveyron. It started off with the young boy, close to ten years old, living alone. Sometimes he went into the village to look for food and one time he got caught. He escaped through on multiple accounts and when they finally caught him for good he got sent to a school for the blind and deaf since he would not talk. He then got sent to a school with a professor who wanted to examine him. He ran multiple tests and put clothes on him. He got sent to multiple different places never gaining his freedom back.

[Kiko León · Rating 4 out of 5]

La historia de un niño, Víctor, y de su maestro Jean Itard, que revolucionaron la educación.
Bien documentada y maravillosamente narrada.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book, focussing on the boy subsequently named Victor who was found after years living alone in the woods in southern France, is very interesting. Feral children provoke fascinating questions about what it means to be human, about the extent to which severe childhood deprivation can be repaired (answer: not very far), about the compulsion to survive, about how children are socialised, about the nature and learning of language. Victor is the first, it seems, to have prompted extensive efforts to teach and socialise him, and extensive records of his training and response were left. The second half of the book focuses on his teacher, a young doctor named Itard, specifically and efforts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to teach the deaf (as Victor was at first believed to be) and the mute to use and produce language (sign language, written language, and spoken language) more generally. I simply wasn't interested enough in the technicalities of such pedagogical efforts to read the second half with any care. My failing rather than the book's.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting reading, although some of the interpretations are likely to be outdated.