• 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

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