Preface from "The Hundred Languages of Children" Catalogue

The City of Reggio Emilia

By Guilio Fantuzzi, Mayor of Reggio Emilia and Eletta Bertani, Head of the Department of Education, Reggio Emilia

Printed in 1987

© Reggio Children

When the City Administration of Reggio Emilia decided to present the exhibit, "The Hundred Languages of Children," it made a courageous and forward looking statement through the ideas and experiences developed in the City Preschools and Infant Toddler Centers – an entire community's creative talent on show. A community that defends today, as it always has, the rights and interests of children and their families especially during the most difficult moments of history.

This exhibit, originally called, "L'occhio se salta il muro" (The eye, if it leaps over the wall), has already made a name for itself in a number of cities in Europe where it has been shown. It has received praise from representatives of scientific, cultural and political fields and now that it has been updated, enlarged and about to set out on an even longer and more complex journey, we hope that it will be greeted with the same enthusiasm and generate the same positive responses.

Twenty years of experience in Preschools and Infant Toddler Centers are the basis of the originality and richness of this exhibit which documents real life situations and processes. These actual experiences cannot be reduced to established educational formulas, to pre-conceived notions about teaching children nor to theory-based certitude or practices destined for generalized use. We are not dealing with studies carried out in the rarefied and elite atmosphere of the research center or the prescribed and classified method not unknown in both Italian and European Preschools and Infant Toddler Centers. No, our efforts are based on continual and active research by many individual – so many bands and minds working harmoniously even today to create experiences rooted in the child’s well-being and aimed at insuring his independence. It is experiences based on confidence in the child’s own resources and on the combined understanding and contribution of both politicians and educators linked by the common goal of preserving individual and social rights for adults and children alike.

The messages we would like to deliver with this exhibit are many: ability and courage to look ahead; fundaments optimism in the potential of mankind in general and children in particular, confidence that, despite everything, new and wider horizons can be reached; that the rights and destiny of the child should be inseparably linked to those of the adult and finally, the awareness that the child’s need for self-expression and freedom of choice is more important today than ever before in a world where the child is increasingly forgotten and closed out by adults.

Our hope is that these "messages," these values contained in our exhibit will enrich educational debates and studies in every part of the world and will work toward building future cultural relationships and exchanges on an international scale. We face this new adventure with satisfaction and pride and we do not deny it. The task confronting us is important, significant and certainly not easy but we also realize that it will provide us with new and stimulating challenges.

All of this implies precise responsibilities. As administrators, we are called upon to defend and to continue our work of consolidating these services. School personnel at every level and in every service area must continue their ongoing commitment, must work with the right amount of creative tension, professional competence, but also with solid hard work which we all publicly acknowledge and for which we thank you all most heartily.

Preface from “The Hundred Languages of Children” Catalogue

The Region of Emilia Romagna

By Luciano Guerzoni, President of the Region of Emilia Romagna and Giuseppe Corticelli, Head of the Regional Department School of Culture, Sports, and Leisure Activities

Printed in 1987

© Reggio Children

The qualitative and quantitative wealth of the Nursery Schools in our area offers today, after some years, both the possibility of measuring the results of what has been achieved so far by its operators and a record of the steady political care of the local Administrations and of the Region.

The contribution of the various cultural skills, the permeation between the development of the social and educational services and the collective and civil life the evolution in theoretical acquisition and practical experimentation, are a sign of the project-making of these years and offer the possibility of a comparison which goes beyond our national borders and plays an active and positive part in the international debate.

This Exhibition, organized by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, which has been for many years in the forefront in the field of children's education, suggests how to read the complexities of the educational project through children's "works," their way of representing the real and the unreal, their way of being allowing the adults to understand the deep sensitivity concerning those “world details” which, once grown up, we don’t care for anymore.

The Region Emilia Romagna wishes that this Exhibition, like all the enterprises which can spring from it, will make it possible to reflect upon the way of conceiving and doing education and will show the social productivity of an investment in services for children also in terms of a more comprehensive cultural proposal regarding adults and the whole society.

We would like the record proposed by the Exhibition, which reveals the introspective skill of adults and children in their reciprocal worlds, to become an object of confrontation and debate for operators, teachers, parents, chief interlocutors of a n educational process, so contributing to add a new tile in the complex mosaic which today characterizes the children and the society in which they live.

Preface from "The Hundred Languages of Children" Catalogue

The Hundred Languages of Children

By Loris Malaguzzi

Printed in 1987

© Reggio Children

Excerpts from Malaguzzi's introduction of the exhibit in the exhibit catalogue….

(Page 16) We hope the result [of this exhibit] is a story without masks: a conciliation of the possible with what we owe our children, an attempt to give substance to hypotheses and expectations that come from an experience as real as it is unfinished. We place our trust in Thomas to a certain extent who said "that if they make real experiments they can make the consequences of them real too."

Anderson would say that every exhibition has a needle and a long, long thread. In the real story, the needle has been sewing and mending for over thirty years… It has been a fortunate period shared by teachers and families in an open city where people can still think, argue, and make plans – not only because it is a city able to make choices for its children (something that can obviously be done anywhere) but also because it honors them tenaciously.

Those who work in education, chiefly children’s education, are well aware of the recurring ambiguities and inertia of social policy and the paradox that require special privileges and “extra-generous” personal commitment to prevent projects, plans and hopes from running aground. Our friend Brofenbrenner is right a hundred times over (a hundred, just like the languages of children) when he states that for an ecological and significant approach to the study and research of human development, basic science needs social policy more than social policy needs basic science. But, science and politics must still learn to take reciprocal advantage of one another through independent elaboration which, when removed from the pressures of ideologies and special interests, lets the facts, the results and consensus of the children point out the way….

…Despite everything, it is legitimate to think that creativity, that is, knowledge and the wonder of knowledge (man’s most important right – and one that often goes unrecognized), can serve as the strong point of our work. And it is our hope that it will become the regular travelling companion in the development of our children.