Languages

100 languages

10 January 2019

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 to 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 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 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.
But, the child says:
No way. The hundred is there.

–Loris Malaguzzi

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