Savages or Children of Nature?

United States
February 9, 2007 6:08pm CST
Have any of you heard of the Wild Boy of Aveyron? Around the 1800s a boy around 12 years old was found in a forest. He was naked, dirty, spoke no language known to men, and seemed to be uncivilized. One doctor tried to help him adapt to humans' civilized ways. But after not being able to teach him spoken language, all the efforts were given up and the boy named Victor was labeled as an "idiot". Many cases of children growing up with little or no civilized human contact have shown up and been studied. Because of their "different" ways, do you consider them human? What should we do with them? After watching the French movie "The Wild Child" I was fascinated by stories like Victor's and Genie's, a girl who was kept away from civilized contact in a small closet room. I believe that they are basically at the root of what humans once were so are still humans and that children like Genie should be taken care of by good human guardians. For children like Victor, he seemed happy in the wild and was forced into civilization. He still has his own choices. He was better off free in the forest then kept in a kind of prison for "idiots."
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