"Intelligences Captives" was written to make known the children afflicted by cerebral palsy and their world—so particular, so isolated.
"I am a teacher, and that is why I have tried to describe them as they enter social life for the first time: the classroom.
My aim is to stir a deeper human understanding of who they are, rather than offer the systematic clinical account found in other books.
The first section, more grounded in observation and objectivity, uses descriptions of severely affected children to draw us into their closed world, and then offers—briefly—some thoughts on their future."
So Jacqueline Baillod introduces her book. I want to add that reading it moved and engaged me completely.
This is the work of a skilled and deeply compassionate person.
On every page, you see the teacher's gifts—the knowledge of how to teach reading, how to work with groups, and so on. But there is also in her the soul of a researcher; she has had to discover everything about these children she encountered, at first, by chance.
And what strikes you on every page is her extraordinary sensitivity toward each child and the remarkable way she speaks of each one.
This brings me finally to emphasize the quality of her prose, which makes the book not only instructive and moving, but genuinely compelling. She tells stories, and tells them very well. The story of Gilles—reprinted below—is proof of this.
I hope that teachers especially will read this excellent book, which I believe will give them both great help and instruction.
Intelligences Captives
A Teacher Discovers Children with Cerebral Palsy
by Jacqueline Baillod
Publisher: Forniture assortite – 1981
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This book is currently available only in French, but the publisher, with whom we have been in contact, is very open to an Italian edition, which we hope may soon be published.
[...] Fortunately, Gilles's sensitivity was not only a source of pain to him.
[...] We had planted balsam seeds in several pots—an activity that had excited all the students who took part with real enthusiasm. But despite watering them every morning, we grew tired of waiting for them to sprout.
At the end of August, after the summer holidays, one morning as soon as Gilles was settled into his chair, he showed signs of intense agitation.
When Gilles became excited, he had no control—not over any movement of his hands and arms, not over his facial muscles. When such emotion seized him, his movements were unmistakable. It took me time to follow his gaze and figure out what he was trying to tell me; the sounds he made were not always intelligible. It took patience to discover the reason for all that agitation.
On the desk sat the pots with the balsam plants. One of them had opened: a delicate white flower now rose among the glossy leaves.
Gilles alone had noticed it. I brought the fragile plant closer to him. Then, with a clumsy and difficult gesture, fighting against the involuntary spasms of athetosis that tormented his poor small hands, he tried to bring his hands together and imposed on us the silence of his wonder.
His gesture, however labored and distorted, said clearly: "My God, how beautiful it is! How is it possible?"
Witnessing the delicacy of this feeling, I was seized with fear: Would I know, would we know how to love him enough, to listen with enough attention, so that the unsuspected treasures within him would not be lost despite his painful handicap?
Could we protect him effectively against the inferiority he always felt creeping near?