With _stella_ we have him repeat the whole word, bringing the teeth together, and holding the tongue (which has a tendency to protrude) close against the upper teeth.
In _rana_ we have him repeat _r_, _r_, _r_, thus exercising the tongue in the vibratory movements. In _gatto_ we hold the voice upon the guttural _g_.
NATURE IN EDUCATION--AGRICULTURAL LABOUR: CULTURE OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS
Itard, in a remarkable pedagogical treatise: "_Des premiers développements du jeune sauvage de l'Aveyron_," expounds in detail the drama of a curious, gigantic education which attempted to overcome the psychical darkness of an idiot and at the same time to snatch a man from primitive nature.
The savage of the Aveyron was a child who had grown up in the natural state: criminally abandoned in a forest where his assassins thought they had killed him, he was cured by natural means, and had survived for many years free and naked in the wilderness, until, captured by hunters, he entered into the civilised life of Paris, showing by the scars with which his miserable body was furrowed the story of the struggles with wild beasts, and of lacerations caused by falling from heights.
The child was, and always remained, mute; his mentality, diagnosed by Pinel as idiotic, remained forever almost inaccessible to intellectual education.
To this child are due the first steps of positive pedagogy. Itard, a physician of deaf-mutes and a student of philosophy, undertook his education with methods which he had already partially tried for treating defective hearing--believing at the beginning that the savage showed characteristics of inferiority, not because he was a degraded organism, but for want of education. He was a follower of the principles of Helvetius: "Man is nothing without the work of man"; that is, he believed in the omnipotence of education, and was opposed to the pedagogical principle which Rousseau had promulgated before the Revolution: "_Tout est bien sortant des mains de l'Auteur des choses, tout dégénère dans les mains de l'homme_,"--that is, the work of education is deleterious and spoils the man.
The savage, according to the erroneous first impression of Itard, demonstrated experimentally by his characteristics the truth of the former assertion. When, however, he perceived, with the help of Pinel, that he had to do with an idiot, his philosophical theories gave place to the most admirable, tentative, experimental pedagogy.
