A POEM 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 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 speak
to understand without joy
to love and 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!
- Loris Malaguzzi
Malaguzzi ( 1921-1994 ) was used recently by an wonderful co-writer, professor Matti Telemäki, as a beginning piece in our small book written just before he died. He wanted this poem to be looked at more and acted upon by more inside of educational circles.
Of course there are hundreds of educational theories and approaches too. So there should !!!! Shame that so many today wish to standardise and target and Americanise or UKise. yUK.
27 comments:
Nice poem.
You shouldn't rob any child of their fantasy world. Yet isn't it also the case that you want children to live in the world. Imparting the magic of education is so difficult to achieve perfectly. Can't thinking without hands be as rewarding as thinking with them?
Yes Toby : But this educational project that the likes of malaguzzi helped along was NOT "fantasy world".
But fantasy worlds are sometimes ok too in this one hundred scheme.
A. North Whithead used to write about similar ways and he would COMBINE the conceptual ( cognitive-abstracted) with the romance. All was a dynamic. that was 1931.
My point remains is that the UK, following absurd USA management training schemes, has targets and outcomes and will-be-must-be-worlds of conformity to THEIR standard.
For places like the UK education is dead. Training lives.
Such schemes seem so opposed to the UK that I know and I would argue they are never treated seriously. The UK is the country of Falstaff and Tristram Shandy at the same time as the rigidly puritanical streak coming back to haunt us from the former colonies.
Toby : You can appreciate Tristram Shandy where the words are questions and the questions are always moving. I think you have given a wonderful example of the kind of thing that malaguzzi sensed too for REAL.
But where is a Tristram Shandy today in typical UK schools I ask? You know but most never even get the chance to spot a bear or ....
You have been lucky in this way and you have been well away from the typical UK schools. That i can tell.
However I would support your sense of a good education and critical thought.
I just want it available for all.
That means saying no to market forces that disguise themselves as "learning". As you know education is no longer even a word that is appropriate to UK politics.
Sometimes Toby i think that you do really believe what you write.
At other times I cannot even imagine you really believing that what is written under Toby and reason and sword and eclectic and eccentric.
You must find your CONCENTRICITY methinks.
This said with a friendly smile.
And for all those long-suffering parents Ms Melancholy has some timely advice.
Nice poem, Zolascribe. But as I understand it Finland is a little paradise for schoolchidren. It keeps scoring best in all these PISA surveys.
I'm happy with my child's nursery. The child's needs are central there, but they strike the right balance with authority. Other than that, these little toddlers can run around, play, create and discover as much as they like.
The problem comes when children in Germany reach primary school. The main education method still seems to be an awkward combination of learning by rote and belittling the child's native ability to acquire new information and insights. I hope that by the time Duckling reaches that age we are either elsewhere or local insitutions have modernised their approaches appropriately.
Yellow Duck . I agree with your sentiments and your humanity.
But I suspect yer duckling will need all the care of a yellow duck pond to counter-balance official market(ed) yukkication.
Good luck with duckling.
The MSmelon site is great too for this melaguzzi way ( thanks YD) and she really blogs with " a just good enough" background assumption.
"However I would support your sense of a good education and critical thought.
I just want it available for all."
The odd thing is though, Zola, aren't there numerous ways to receive a good education? To be a Ballerina, pianist or revolutionary physicist you need to start at a very early age. Similarly if people aren't very academic or especially talented in ways that formal academic education selects, couldn't it be the case that they would be better off having apprenticeships as Plumbers, Electricians, Carpenters, farmers, shopowners, butchers; essentially professions that society needs, rewards and the practitioners find enjoyable. The current situation we have seems to imply everyone can study philosophy or physics and what kind of state do you create if you do that? A world of people who live in the moon and can't feed themselves surrounded by others who have lost their self-worth because they haven't achieved some arbitrary expectation of the state. This is why comprehensives are such an unimaginative failure. I know you are proposing something different but society in reforming its education system, needs to be aware of difference.
Maybe you are talking here about a national Curriculum more than about a comphrehensive school as such ( although in the UK this term got so twisted around that who knows what a comphrehensive is !!?)
Was it marx that wrote for those that would be encouraged to farm, to read books, to go fishing and all that all in the same day? OK bad example because that labels me with mao.
Anyway Toby your main points seem to agree with Malaguzzi where your UK specific points remain light years away.
Why is that?
The magic of childhood can be catered for in all. Yet you need education to provide people with the skills to feed and fend for themselves. This means some will be better at things than others.
His Life
........
Beauty begat him
Mother smothered him
Father forgot him
Television taught him
School scolded him
Bravado emboldened him
Trouble tempered him
Rules wrote him
Vacations vacuumed him
Games engulfed him
Friends fooled him
Platitudes placated him
Novels naughtied him
Banter backed him
Sex screwed him
Love left him
Numbers nurtured him
Career captured him
Money made him
Nerves knifed him
Telephone tied him
Dreams denied him
Betting broke him
Laws led him
From morning
To madness
Philip Healey
1994
Perhaps my main point here is to try and make new starts - this Toby asks for if i understand ok - an anticant demands, quite rightly critical writing to put forward alternatives.
My main point is to encourage an education that is based upon real living folk as they are and may be and also to make new starts from POSING PROBLEMS ( paulo freire in a nutshell) rather than insipid "problem solving games of late.
I call for alternatives agreed and practiced together through new questions coming alive.
The age old elitist, competitive, military styled and class led UK ways of national socialisation must be broken up and changed.
Thanks BoldScot for that poem I guess you can still dream that dream yourself.
Yes Toby : Some people will be better at some things than others. No problem with that. Indeed that is one of the beautiful human ways - we are different.
But that "being better" needs not be yet another classification system or another institutionalised elitism. And such being better has few needs for competitive exams or league tables or targets ( get yer arrows into that bullseye me dears) etc, etc.
But this means, as you would be the first to point out, a change in both social structures and a change of mindset.
The uk shows no sign of even thinking about such a need to change.
Alternative voices must show and even prove sometimes that all human beings have one hundred or more good ways.
Such a starting point is subversive.
Long live the subversive I say.
For those wanting to continue this rather radical post, where even the conservatives get human and away from dogma, see the ECLECTIC ECCENTRICS site. Toby and others continue this conversation there.
Hi all. Wonderful poem Zola. It will stay with me as I teach my students their oboe lessons this week.
What the hell happened to the Renaissance Man...-person- whatever? What happened to Mad Max? What happened to private lessons of all sorts for children outside of the traditional classroom?
For two years my wife taught violin at a conservatory in Ontario that housed a Waldorf School. She never observed any of the negative stereotypes perpetuated about Waldorf philosophy during her tenure at the conservatory.
Music and visual art played a crucial part in learning new skills like arithmetic in these Waldorf classrooms. Mimi and I have yet to have a child, but we plan on choosing a school that offers as many creative and imaginative activities as problem solving ones. But also plan on taking an active role in enriching the hypothetical kid outside of the classroom. Without freedom and encouragement to create and imagine youth are doomed to an adult existence as a drone.
Are Waldorf Schools frowned upon in Finland and the UK? Some are publicly funded in North America. It would be fantastic to see a publicly funded school take care of all the possibilities, but with population sizes the way they are today, it seems virtually impossible to do it all. For the most part, I think public schools in many parts of North America have become windowless day care centres and nothing more. With thirty kids in a classroom and art programs being cut like weeds, what's a teacher to do?
UK/US = bucks for war, not education.
Is this the lone ranger that was never lonely?
Music to me ears me old.
This be the Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
What a happy man, that Philip Larkin. If he was right maybe the faults in education are closer to home.
To be fair on the Labour government, there has been massive investment in state education. The problem is they have a very target driven mindset and so this investment drive may have led to a greater degree of control from central government. Music to the ears of Zola, however, is there is talk of lessening the role of the national curriculum and leaving teachers more of a free rein. Let's hope such reforms can be pushed through.
Buy that man a drink
That I think
And that I say.
Do, it, do it, do it....
BTW : In mANY CUTURES THERE IS NO WORD FOR teaching as such.
The Welsh ( not the UK) language has a word that links teaching with learningand learning with folk together. Trouble is I cannot spell it !!!!
A bit like life methinks.
I cite a 1980s ting .-
"Adventure is such a mis-used word ".
Fuck it where is me handy.....
I can name football players from the past but i cannot remember idols today.
"Somebody help me there,
won't somebody tell me where I went wrong."
We gota get out of this place,
If its the last thing we ever do.
Flowers Are Red lyrics by HARRY CHAPIN
Little boy on the first day of school
Got some crayons and started to draw
He drew colors all over the paper
For colors was what he saw
And the teacher said.. "What you doin' young man?"
"I'm paintin' flowers" he said
"It's not the time for art, young man
And anyway flowers are green and red...
There's a time for everything young man
And a way it should be done
You've got to show concern for everyone else
For you're not the only one
And she said...
Flowers are red young man and
Green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen
But the little boy said...
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in a flower and I see every one
The teacher said.. You're sassy
There's ways that things should be
And you'll paint flowers the way they are
So repeat after me.....
And she said...
Flowers are red young man and
Green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen
But the little boy said...
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in a flower and I see every one
The teacher put him in a corner
She said.. It's for your own good..
And you won't come out 'til you get it right
And are responding like you should
Well finally he got lonely
Frightened thoughts filled his head
And that little boy went up to the teacher
And this is what he said.. and he said
Flowers are red, green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen
Time went by like it always does
And they moved to another town
And the little boy went to another school
And this is what he found
The teacher there was smilin'
She said...Painting should be fun
And there are so many colors in a flower
So let's use every one
But that little boy painted flowers
In neat rows of green and red
And when the teacher asked him why
This is what he said.. and he said
Flowers are red, and green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than the way they always have been seen.
Well BoldScot : I see that you do not live with numbers.
Colours you like.
never pass a GCSE that way.
Give me a BoldScot before 7 and I will give you the man.
After living some time in the land of RL S in a mews by Queen Street I still wonder about Scotland.
Punk rock was there before London and a few other things....
love it boldscot.
Scotland the Brave ?
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