Quote of the Day: Loris Malaguzzi on Parenting & Family

Before he became a celebrated architect of early childhood education, Loris Malaguzzi had to rebuild faith, his own and his community’s, amid the wreckage of postwar Italy, when schools were scarce, resources were thinner than hope, and the easiest temptation was to standardize children into silence. He learned, the hard way, that you cannot manufacture imagination by decree; you can only make room for it. That hard-earned humility sits inside his line: “Our task, regarding creativity, is to help children climb their own mountains, as high as possible. No one can do more.”

The mountain metaphor is a corrective to an adult habit: we love to substitute our map for a child’s terrain. We pick the “right” peak, grades, trophies, tidy outcomes, and then wonder why curiosity stalls. Malaguzzi insists the mountain must be theirs: their questions, their pace, their strange detours that look like distractions until they become discoveries. This is what respect looks like in education: not lowered demands, but individualized ambition.

“As high as possible” is not a slogan for pressure; it’s an argument against comparison. The point isn’t to sort children into winners and laggards, but to cultivate conditions where every child can risk effort. Adults become the steady infrastructure, materials, time, attention, honest feedback, so children can practice resilience without being shamed by setbacks.

And then the bracing final sentence: “No one can do more.” It names a boundary. You can’t climb for them. You can remove barriers, model courage, and refuse to confuse obedience with learning, but the leap of creativity remains irreducibly personal.

Loris Malaguzzi, the visionary behind the Reggio Emilia approach, spent his life proving that children think in “a hundred languages” when adults design environments worthy of them. If December invites year-end assessments and neat narratives, his reminder is sharper: measure your work by the quality of the climb you support, not the summit you select.