The Hundred Languages of Children

Since it's the 100th Day of School... ;)
I have here one of the greatest poems I've read about children.

The Hundred Languages
Loris Malaguzzi

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 marvelling, of loving,
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding,
a hundred worlds
to discover,
to invent,
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 Christmas.

They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine
forcing thought without a body
action without a mind.

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 knows:
The Hundred is there.


I hope we are not stealing the hundred languages of our children :)
-charisse