We’re human, we walk and talk like humans, we eat and sleep like humans, we even look human. But what makes a human, human? Is it what we look like, how we express our emotions or our behavior in general? This question has puzzled sociologists for decades and the only thing that has aided their quest has been the random appearances of feral and isolated children.
Feral children are children who have grown up in nature and have had little to no human socialization, some feral children have even been raised by animals such as wolves, monkeys, and dogs. Isolated children on the other hand are children who have been severely neglected by their caretakers and as a result have been isolated to a single room. Both feral and isolated children are the same in that both have had limited interaction with other humans resulting in a variety of problems including limited speech, lack of ability to walk upright, and lack of awareness of certain surroundings (McCrone).
The book The Myth of Irrationality – the science of the mind from Plato to Star Trek by John McCrone described in detail two very real cases of feral children who were found and later submerged in to human society. The first case described is one of the oldest and best documented cases of feral children; it is the account of Victor. Victor also called Victor of Aveyron, was discovered in the Aveyron region of France in the year 1800 (McCrone). After being captured on more than one occasion Victor was taken to the home of Jean Itard who hoped to resocialize Victor in to human society (McCrone). After several long years of working with the boy, Victor was no more human like than the average trained animal. Victors language skills were atrocious topping off at a grand total of about twelve or thirteen words, and at times he would still revert back to his animal like instincts to walk on all fours and rip off his clothing; thus he was never fully socialized (McCrone).
The second case discussed in the book told the story of two girls in India who were discovered at the ages of three and five and were remarkably raised by wolves (McCrone). Neither had the ability to speak and both shunned all human existence in a way similar to Victor (McCrone). In fact, the only difference between Victor and the two girls seems to be that the girls had wolf like tendencies such as barring their teeth when threatened or howling at nighttime. The girls were taken to an orphanage where their caretaker attempted to make them human but like Itard was unsuccessful. The younger of the two died suddenly of a sickness and the other like Victor seemed to hit a mental road block when it came to learning more than thirty or forty words and putting together to form sentences (McCrone).
To explain this bizarre mental road block sociologists and psychologists alike have come up with several well thought out theories. George Herbert Meade said that humans are able to think because of symbols, but without society no symbols would exist (Henslin 61). This is something that kept Victor and the two wolf girls from speaking, humans do not speak just because they are human, they speak because other humans teach them to speak or speak around them, thus encouraging them to do the same.
Another reason for feral and isolated children’s lack of language skills may also be explained biologically. Children generally begin to talk in the sensorimotor stage of life, but do not understand what they are saying and cannot put the words together in sentences because they are imitating those around them (Henslin 61). As children grow they begin to gain the ability to use words in everyday life this usually occurs in the preoperational stage (Henslin 61). Neither Victor nor the two girls from India ever experienced either of the two stages and therefore they never gained the ability to speak. Furthermore, while watching a show on TLC about Feral Children I learned that children only have a limited amount of time to learn how to speak. During this time in life also called the sensorimotor stage (which occurs from birth to until age two), the brain has the ability to learn vast amounts of information everyday; however as a person grows older they loose this ability and can only learn small bits of information everyday. In sum as a child’s brain changes in to that of an adult they loose the ability to acquire vast amounts of information. If a child does not begin to learn language during the sensorimotor or early in the preoperational stages of life, language will become difficult to learn because their brain cannot memorize that much information anymore.
Itard also said that Victor often walked on all fours as did the two girls from India whose legs were even deformed from the lack of ‘proper’ use (McCrone). Later Itard came to the conclusion that humans do some things naturally where as other things such as walking and speaking they have to learn from someone else (McCrone). Therefore without a role model to teach them children will not learn how to do even the simple things like talking that ‘normal’ humans take for granted.
Though Victor was never truly human he did learn something important for life in human society, that is he learned how to express emotions. All socialized humans seem to have similar reactions for common emotions, people cry when sad, and laugh when happy (Henslin 63). When first captured Victor’s only facial expression was that of a scared little boy, however as he learned the ways of humans he began to on his own to smile and even laugh (McCrone). People look to other people for language and even how to smile, but all humans it seems feel emotions some like Victor lack the ability to express them so once he knew how to smile Victor was able to smile without thinking about it thus showing that he was happy.
Humans are human because of socialization, without socialization we are little more than wild animals. It is imperative for human children to have the influence of another human to learn from. Children must repeat and act out what they see to learn and understand it; humans must also have emotions, and the ability to show emotions. So were Victor and the two wolf girls human? Biologically, yes but they could not speak, their emotions is seemed were limited to global emotions, and they were of course fit to live in the wilderness. One might say they were not human, but I say they were. They would be considered in my mind what humans were like before we learned to speak and walk; they were all human, they were simply not like us in terms of thought. They thought of the world differently because of how the world had raised them, they are in ways almost like another culture, a culture that we know so little and so much about.
