THE 100 LANGUAGES OF CHILDREN
‘The hundred languages’ is a symbolic representation for children to express themselves through multiple paths which includes the communicative, cognitive, imaginative, ethical and even metaphorical. Besides using spoken language, children experiment and develop competencies in various forms of expressions through gestures, drawing, painting, building, music or even dancing. With these, children make meanings by reinventing and constructing concepts while consolidating their understanding of the world around them in endless ways.
No way.
The hundred is there.
The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.
-Loris Malaguzzi
(Translated by Lella Gandini)