Victor of Aveyron

Feral children constitute a controversial topic to the specialists in the Human Sciences, given the social, psychological, and linguistic implications -among many others- that secluding a child from society at an early age has. I am about to consider what Victor of Aveyron, a Feral child found in France in the 1800's who went through a long process of growing up in the wild, finding his place in society, and trying to adapt to a new life: that of humans.

According to the L’Enfant Sauvage movie, Victor had a severe wound on his throat, perhaps caused in his early years by an attempt of assassination by his caretakers.  Having been abandoned in the wild, he had to adapt to the environment, feeding himself from the plants and animals that surrounded him, and acquiring extraordinary physical abilities that rarely could average children imitate. When Dr. Itard and Madame Guérin took over his re-education, Victor showed response to neither the presence of other humans, nor to heat, words, or noises. However, in later clinical psychology experiments, he proved to respond to the crack of a walnut (which would demonstrate his selective hearing), and showed interest in going towards the sunlight and nature. His biggest pleasures in life seemed to derive from nature, like when he contemplated nature through the window when he drank water.

Dr. Itard carried out experiments to teach Victor the name of some objects, and asked him to withdraw them from other rooms, but he missed the ability to generalize that a hammer could be any hammer, not necessarily that one in the other room, and to bring objects at a random order because he missed the capacity to see the general objective of tasks. He also missed the ability to empathize with other humans -though he did so little by little, especially with Madame Guérin- and to recognize himself in the mirror, contrary to some apes. Other experiments included teaching him the alphabet, the drawings and symbols of some words, and writing his name.  Even though Dr. Itard was very eager to complete every ambitious task, Victor soon lacked interest, not to mention that he was often punished if his behavior or response were not correct (as in Skinner’s Behaviorism). Other than the above, Victor lacked the human abilities to feel compassion for others and to judge a situation by himself, but he did cry when Dr. Itard was being unfair to him, showing an apparent sight of morality.

He had little progress over the years: he paid more and more attention, used his memory more effectively, became neater, produced more sounds to make himself understood, discovered his imagination and learned to play. He started using all his senses to get new knowledge and carry out tasks. He then learned some adjectives and finally he began writing. He never learned to speak more than a few words (perhaps Broca’s aphasia?), but he could write his needs. After six years he moved out to live a life of his own.

 What I can say as an educator is that human nature is a constant, and there might be forces that lead us to behave in special ways.  According to Chomsky (and Lenneberg, 1976), the critical period for children to acquire language is before puberty, but even children like Victor can slowly adapt to society if provided with the right input, and a loving environment that fosters their learning. As Tomasello (2003) puts it: “when we learn we learn in symbols… We go to school to become symbolic. Language is symbolic, which is why it’s so difficult”.  Nature will always drag Victor to climb the trees, but nurture will tell him what other things the tree is useful for. 

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

If the government hired me to create a bilingual program for the public schools in my country, I would not focus on the syllabus first, but I would follow Anderson’s guidelines as to the practical aspects of teaching:

Here is where I start dreaming...

First, I would invest funds on creating a nice learning environment for children: I would have school classroom walls painted (lively colors); I’d buy plastic, washable, resisting desks and chairs; I’d bring MP3-CD recorders to play low, soothing music constantly, I’d supply each classroom with a TV set with a DVD; and I’d adapt four computer rooms with capacity for 40 students each (Anderson’s learning environment and state setting). Simultaneously, I’d do some research on what the students’ expectations and interests are as to learning English.

Second, I would build a big resource center that teacher could go to. In this place, they could find material from the most basic classes to the highest levels of English. I’d fill it with flashcards, posters, big-scale tales, handouts, paper, glue, magazines, scissors, and EFL memory games (mnemonics). Third, I would leave a room reserved for pre-schoolers, for who I would buy toys, costumes, and props that help them learn through games and songs (perception).

Fourth, I would have the alumni make a campaign to have an English-speaking school for all, including making posters in English, inviting students to participate in events in English (Show and Tell, Pet Day, English Day, English Club, Movie club, Song club, English Monitor Elections, Talent Show), and even posting “You Are Here” maps and other signs in English around the school (Overstimulation). Fifth, I would do extensive training sessions with both experienced and new teachers in every room, so that they experienced the feeling of being taught in a non-traditional way and I’d finally adapt the program curriculum to the Ministry of Education guidelines, but not far from a communicative learning approach.

This is what I would do in a utopian world, if I had the resources and the government’s approval… because when you dream you can paint the sky with stars!

“ACT-R” = “ACTOR”

According to Anderson, there are some devices called “ACT-R” (Adaptive control of thought - rational), whose function is not only to explain how people remember and manage cognition, but also to recreate this process on computational skills, and which have been used in “accelerated learning” (originally “Suggestopedia”). Their most important assumption is that human knowledge can be divided into declarative and procedural representations. In plain words, learning takes place in Modules, which contain chunks, and which are accessible only by “buffers”. Thus, modules produce cognition, and if we go step by step (in modules) constructing knowledge, we’ll take information from one kind of memory to the next, and we’ll yield “productions” of what we learn.


I agree with the notion that we learn in chunks, because humans usually process one thing at a time, especially when learning something new. I do believe that once we have acquired certain skills, observed the competent users of those abilities, made associations to our previous knowledge, and formulated and proved our own hypotheses, we can make effective use of those skills overtime, even to the point where we do things automatically, as ‘procedural knowledge’.

I guess that I have already taught my students by resorting to modules. Whenever I have to teach what I call the “magic formula” for Conditionals, I go from the factual conditional to the unreal past one, and I focus a lot on the one for second conditional: I start telling my students a sad or funny story using their classmates, and I start writing a good example on the board. I usually choose one couple in class (with opposite hair and eye color) and I write: “If Camilo and Lorena had a baby girl, she …”. Students must think of genetics and dominant factors before giving me a complement. Then I go on with the formula: I tell students that they have three possibilities; I write a big “WILL”, a medium sized “can”, and a very small “may” so that they can see their likelihood. It has always been very effective, despite teaching explicit grammar terms, as we must do where I work, perhaps because this step by step process goes along with loads of practice, and humoristic explanations and examples in which the teacher becomes an actor; an entertainer.

FORCED TO LEARN SLOVAC

If a student were to learn a language, it would ideally be up to his/her choice, one would say. Nonetheless, let us think for one minute of the implications that forcing a student to learn a ‘strange’ language would have. That happened to me when learning Slovak, which I had never even heard.

I was absent from the first class, to my own detriment, but the reason why I was absent means good and bad news: the disadvantage was that I obviously felt lost and clueless in the second session, not being able to recognize one single word either hear or read. The advantage was that having recently traveled to Sweden and Germany, for instance, I had that sensation of being lost really fresh in my mind: I had gotten used to moving around a city where no one spoke my language –sometimes not even English-, just by relying on a metro map. When approached by people who told me something I did not understand, I simply smiled and shrunk my shoulders, (like when the Slovak teacher asked me something out of the blue in the third session). Then I listed some languages I could either speak or understand (the romance languages, due to their similarity with Spanish, of course) and it worked like a charm.

This process does not remind me of when I started to learn English - because that happened more than two decades ago, and I never attended classes taught in English- but it reminds me of the time when I had to teach introductory courses to true beginners. My students were adults who were generally afraid of being taught in English, but had a burning need to learn it because of the usual reasons: work or studies. I remember feeling like an octopus as a designed material, prepared class, and used the context and personalizations to convey a message; like a clown when I explained vocabulary and even grammar solely in English; and like a rabbit after I had taught the class: sometimes scared of what was yet to come, and other times jumpy and enthusiastic about the next challenge. I guess teaching is a passion that reveals itself after you, over the years, remove its countless masks.