Parenting & Family Quote by Loris Malaguzzi

Malaguzzi writes like someone watching wonder get mugged in broad daylight. “A hundred languages” isn’t a cute metaphor for “kids are creative”; it’s a direct claim that children arrive with full-spectrum intelligence: gesture, rhythm, touch, play, drawing, silence, movement, imitation, nonsense, and sudden, piercing logic. The pile-up of “hundred hundred hundred more” performs that abundance on the sentence level, refusing neat accounting. Then he flips it: “they steal ninety-nine.” The shock is deliberate. Schooling isn’t framed as a neutral conveyor belt with a few trade-offs; it’s cast as a cultural extraction industry.

The subtext is an argument against the modern habit of treating learning as primarily verbal and measurable. When Malaguzzi says “the school and the culture separate the head from the body,” he’s accusing institutions of enforcing a split that isn’t natural to children but is convenient to adults: a mind that can be tested, ranked, corrected, and eventually employed, detached from the messy, sensory, emotional body that actually experiences the world. “Culture” widens the indictment beyond classrooms to the broader obsession with productivity, order, and legible outcomes.

Context matters: Malaguzzi’s Reggio Emilia approach grew in postwar Italy, in a moment when rebuilding civic life meant rethinking authority. His quote is a warning that education can quietly reproduce the very hierarchies it claims to transcend, by narrowing expression to the few “languages” that fit desks, schedules, and standardized judgment.