Parenting & Family Quote by Loris Malaguzzi

Malaguzzi’s line reads like a gentle provocation: if you want children to care deeply, stop narrowing the menu. The intent is practical, almost architectural. As the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach, he’s arguing that motivation isn’t a trait you either have or don’t; it’s a response to an environment designed with choices, materials, and permission. Give kids more ways to enter an idea - drawing, building, storytelling, arguing, moving - and you don’t just get “engagement.” You get ownership.

The subtext pushes against a school culture that treats uniformity as fairness. Standardization promises order: one lesson, one correct output, one metric to compare children against each other. Malaguzzi flips the moral logic. Restricting possibilities doesn’t make learning simpler; it makes it thinner, because it asks children to translate their curiosity into the single dialect adults prefer. His phrase “range of possibilities” is doing double duty: it’s about resources and also about respect. It implies a belief in children as meaning-makers, not empty containers waiting for content.

Context matters: postwar Italy, civic rebuilding, and a democratic impulse to cultivate citizens rather than compliant test-takers. Reggio Emilia’s classrooms treated space, light, tools, and peers as co-teachers - an ecosystem built to invite initiative. The rhetorical move is subtle but firm: he links freedom to intensity, not chaos. Rich experience, in his view, isn’t enrichment as a luxury add-on; it’s the natural result of taking children’s intelligence seriously enough to offer them more than one way to be brilliant.