KNOWLEDGE AND THE KNOWER—PERSPECTIVES
FERAL CHILDREN AND FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENTS
The Capitoline She-Wolf: Romulus and Remus myth
Students often bring up the subject of feral children spontaneously after the "What do little kids know?" unit.
Some students will have seen Truffault’s 1970 movie L'enfant sauvage which portrays quite accurately the discovery and initial education of Victor the "Wild Child of Aveyron" in the late 18th century. The opening sequence of the movie is certainly worth a look and will stimulate discussion.
I find the feral child phenomenon worth addressing, but refrain from designing a whole unit of inquiry around the topic. The subject can generate more heat than light. When examined critically the few isolated cases on record provide a measure of voyeuristic fascination, but ultimately cannot resolve scientifically language acquisition controversies. Many cases have been shown to be highly exaggerated, mythic or outright bogus.
VICTOR AND GENIE: CAUTIONARY TALES
The wild child of Aveyron had a large, jagged scar on his neck. He was also deaf. It is likely that his throat had been cut and he had been left for dead in the forest around the age of four. As a baby he would not have survived. Is it possible to tease out whether:
1. Victor was abandoned by his family precisely because he was born mentally retarded?
2. Victor never acquired language, and could only be educated minimally, precisely because he had been deprived of basic human nurture during his formative years.
French physician and educator of the deaf, Itard abandoned Victor as soon soon puberty set in. It was Itard’s stoic housekeeper who looked after the boy until he died.
Genie: "LA Wild Child" after she was discovered
A parallel set of questions can be asked with regard to “Genie,” the pseudonym of teenage girl who was discovered by social workers in Los Angeles in 1970. (Eerily, the this was same year the Truffault movie was released.) Genie had been reared in isolation, tied to a “potty chair” without stimulus for 13 years. Her abusive, elderly father escaped the justice system by shooting himself.
Genie was abandoned by researchers and string of foster home parents after her case failed to yield pivotal results or make any reputations in the field of linguistics. She now lives in obscurity in a sheltered institution and is very withdrawn.
FORBIDDEN EXPERIMENTS
Students can be asked to imagine isolation experiments on human babies that could shed light on the nature/nurture debate and language acquisition. What practical difficulties arise? What ethical objections come to mind?
Experiments on non-consenting victims, including young children, were performed in concentration camps by Nazi doctors. Mengele's scientifically worthless and disgusting twin studies are the most notorious example.
Ethical considerations arise constantly throughout the TOK program and are an important element of the Framework. Encountering Nazi atrocities early in the course has the advantage of rapidly undermining the default cultural relativism that many teenagers bring to TOK.
Jewish twins kept alive to be used in Mengele's medical experiments. These children were liberated from Auschwitz by the Red Army in January 1945.
USHMM/Belarusian State Archive of Documentary Film and Photography
CULTURAL RELATIVISM
Try challenging students with the following questions:
1. What is cultural relativism?
2. Try to think of a logical argument that could undermine relativism
3. What can learning about the horrors of the Holocaust tell us about cultural relativism?
The following quote from mathematician and philosopher, Reuben Hersh captures the spirit of a generative classroom. It is an effective posture to adopt when teaching TOK, especially at certain moments of impasse in whole class activities and discussions. Start as you mean to go on. Try your own version of it here with the second, much more open of these two question?
“One day I called for volunteers. No volunteers. I waited. Waited. Then, feeling very brave, I went to the back of the room and sat down and said nothing. For a while. And another while. Then a student went to the blackboard, and then another one.
It turned out to be a very good class. The key was that I was willing to shut up. The easy thing, which I had done hundreds of times, would have been to say, “Okay, I’ll show it to you.” That’s perhaps the biggest difficulty for most, nearly all, teachers-not to talk so much. Be quiet. Don’t think the world’s coming to an end if there’s silence for two or three minutes.”