A Hundred Languages

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
Founder of the Reggio Emilia Approach

The way that I teach, and the way I am made to teach defies my ideals everyday. Every day I feel throughout the day little stabs to the ideal teacher within as something I do squanders another child's expression. It's very hard not to do in todays high-stakes test driven school culture, but it is still hard to be hit multiple times throughout the day with the feeling that I have just said no to another language that a child is trying to use. And they wonder why we have no creativity. When I have my own classroom, I hope to be embarking on a journey to utilize these languages to learn, instead of teaching children to throw these valuable languages away to do things one boring way that probably doesn't make much sense and isn't any fun.