"Instead of teaching them to speak, why not teach ourselves not to speak ?". "When we see the law courts, schools and asylums as they are seen by delinquents, teenagers and madmen, they look weird : likewise, we listen to language as it is heard by mutists, it sounds weird".
Ce gamin, là is about the "Deligny Experiment", the communal life, at Monoblet in the Cévennes, of a group of children whom specialists had pronounced to be incurable and unteachable. The "Deligny Experiment" is neither an istitution nor a counter institution, it is just a place where a child can begin "his" own life.
Since 1967, at Monoblet in the Cévennes, grown-ups have been in close contact with autistic children living, small scattered, loosely integrated units. Deligny is, so to speak, the pilot of "radeaux".