Our experience . . . confirms that children need a great deal of freedom: the freedom to investigate and to try, to make mistakes and to correct mistakes, to choose where and with whom to invest their curiosity, intelligence and motions. Children need the freedom to appreciate the infinite resources of their hands, their eyes and their ears, the resources of forms, materials, sounds and colors. They need the freedom to realize how reason, thought, and imagination can create the continuous interweaving of things, and can move and shake the world. Children must have the freedom to do all this without anyone arbitrarily setting the timing, rhythms, and measures for them. Yet this valuable apprenticeship, which cannot be left to chance, can only be accomplished when children are assured of the broad and active co-participation of adults. --Loris Malaguzzi From the introduction to The Hundred Languages of Children Exhibition |
