Solitary?: The Wild Child And Rousseau's Man Of Nature

In the text ‘ Savage or Solitary?: The Wild Child and Rousseau’s Man of Nature’ by Nancy Yousef she explores how feral children function after being in the wild to fend for themselves. These children are seen as wild animals and when they are contained, they are constantly being studied to see if they are capable of obtaining what is seen as ‘normal’ societal behavior that one would possess. In the text, it looks at how a boy named Victor was found in the wild and when he was finally contained, anthropologists believed this was fascinating because they wanted to see if it was possible to develop what is seen as normal human behavior and since he had not learned this previously, they believed he was a blank slate. In lecture, we discussed that

We can make personal decisions as to what we would like to eat or what color we would like to dye our hair, but we are not free to decide the outcome of our day based on occurrences that are completely out of our control. When we are young children, we are a blank slate and it is our parents that tell us what we can and cannot do, but as we grow older, we think that we finally have freedom, but the government and the justice system are there to keep us in line. An example to show that we are not free is that we are overloaded with debt by the time we are in our mid-twenties whether it is from student loans, tax overpayments, credit cards, or even buying a home. When we take a moment to realize that without working for any given company, we would have no money, therefore we would not be able to survive since money is what allows us to obtain our basic needs such as clothing, food, and shelter. This is absolutely saddening since sometimes it is extremely difficult to find a job that will give you the necessary amount of money to provide for yourself and your family and people end up becoming homeless. In some places like the United States, if a person does not pay their credit card or their mortgage to their home, it is legal for the bank takes the persons belongings away to pay for the item or take away their home. Freedom is what we strive for but it is always going to be