Ever since watching Sir Ken Robinson’s famous TED talk on how schools kill creativity, I’ve been determined not to let school get in the way of my daughter’s education. I love Sir Ken’s analogy of schools being industrial when they should be agricultural. Our school models, he says, are linear rather than organic. We teach children what to think, not how to think. We put them on a production line, feed them facts and test them to death to see how much they remember. Where’s the creativity in that? I once heard Michael Morpurgo talk about why he hated school. He said he was always told off for looking out the window. “But why”, he said, “that’s where the world is.” I came across this wonderful poem by education pioneer Loris Malaguzzi. I think it pretty much sums it up, but the uplifting finale provides inspiration to all of us.
The Hundred Languages of Childhood By 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
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
A hundred languages
(and a 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.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.
Creative Communicator 