Relações entre educação, aprendizagem e desenvolvimento humano: as contribuições de Jean Marc-Gaspard Itard (1774-1838)

Abstract

The interventions carried out in the beginning of the nineteenth century involving the Aveyron s savage , who was called Victor, have been immortalized through Doctor-pedagogue Jean Marc-Gaspard Itard s words. The reports on the work he developed with Victor as well as other documents are the basis of the present research which intends to discuss Itard s contributions to the relations among education, the learning process and the human being development in the constitution of man as a cultural and historical being. In the social historiographical perspective, the following study has sought for the articulation of three, however not mutually excluding, levels of analysis. Firstly, the inner level, which involves the concepts, method, practices, in short, the straight-related aspects to Itard s work; secondly, the methodological basis in which the elements above acquired a certain conformation; and finally the articulation between Itard s work and the Parisian society of the eighteenth century considering the relationships produced in that particular time and place as well as all the aspects that had them established. Itard was a man of his time who had an enormous scientific commitment and was conformed in the sensualist epistemological basis: his ideas as well as his experience were overwhelmed by social, political, economical and cultural influences which resulted from the reality they were in. His work had its beginning in a time when men started being the center of scientific investigations. He contributes with important thoughts about the classificatory criteria used as instruments that define the kind of relationship that we are supposed to establish with the ones who have been evaluated. Through his practice, Itard presents an alternative to segregation, having us think upon social, historical and cultural paths built and supported by Psychology, Medicine and Education for those who failed the patterns determined by that society