Parenting & Family Quote by Loris Malaguzzi

Malaguzzi’s line is less a warm sentiment than a quiet coup against the default settings of school. By calling children “full of potential, competent, and capable,” he flips the usual hierarchy: the adult is no longer the sole author of knowledge, and the child is not a deficit to be corrected. The phrasing is strategic. “Belief” signals an ethical stance, not a technique; Reggio Emilia isn’t a curriculum you adopt so much as a posture you commit to. “Constructing” refuses the idea of learning as delivery. It smuggles in a whole political argument: knowledge is made, negotiated, tested, revised - and children can participate in that process now, not later.

The subtext is a critique of compliance culture. If children are competent, then worksheets, rigid pacing guides, and one-right-answer assessment start to look like adult convenience masquerading as rigor. The quote also protects against romanticizing kids as pure intuition. “Competent” is a demanding word: it implies responsibility, agency, and the expectation that children can handle complexity when the environment respects them.

Context matters. Malaguzzi helped build Reggio Emilia’s schools in postwar Italy, when democratic rebuilding was not abstract. The emphasis on children as citizens-in-training reflects a society trying to inoculate itself against authoritarianism: you don’t get a democratic culture by lecturing about it; you grow it by treating even the youngest people as thinkers whose ideas deserve space, documentation, and debate.