Читать книгу Can I Go and Play Now? - Greg Bottrill - Страница 11

A simple word: faith. Faith in yourself, faith in your innate sense of what education really should be and, most importantly, faith in children.

Perhaps it would help if we focused on arguably one of Europe’s finest educational minds, Loris Malaguzzi, to enable us to switch our focus from outcome-driven and on to a child-driven pedagogy. Malaguzzi was a man who had real faith in young children – he saw them as citizens, as people who participated, who had thoughts, actions, dreams, imagination, all of which lie beyond the interpretation of the adult world. Emerging as a society from the aftermath of the Second World War, he began to set about defining an approach that would create a society that valued children and their education. He had a vision that children could be enabled to realise and express their own ideas along the principles of respect, responsibility and community, and could do so through being empowered to explore and discover via a curriculum that was essentially self-created and travelled through with the gentle and helping hands of adults.

His poem The Hundred Languages of Children beautifully sums up his vision of children, and I would challenge you to disagree with any of its sentiments:

 The child

 is made of one hundred.

 The child has

 a hundred languages

 a hundred hands

 a hundred thoughts

 a hundred ways of thinking

 of playing, of speaking.

 A hundred always a hundred

 ways of listening

 of marveling, of loving

 a hundred joys

 for singing and understanding

 a hundred worlds

 to discover

 a hundred worlds

 to invent

 a hundred worlds

 to dream.

 The child has

 a hundred languages

 (and a hundred hundred hundred more)

 but they steal ninety-nine.

 The school and the culture

 separate the head from the body.

 They tell the child:

 to think without hands

 to do without head

 to listen and not to speak

 to understand without joy

 to love and to marvel

 only at Easter and at Christmas.

 They tell the child:

 to discover the world already there

 and of the hundred

 they steal ninety-nine.

 They tell the child:

 that work and play

 reality and fantasy

 science and imagination

 sky and earth

 reason and dream

 are things

 that do not belong together.

 And thus they tell the child

 that the hundred is not there.

 The child says:

 No way. The hundred is there.

How true and how damning. The adult world seems perennially to want children to be seen and not heard, but the hundred is there in spite of this. We hear the hundred every day. Children want you to hear their joy, their representations of the world, their understanding, their delight, their inquisitiveness. Unfortunately, we are often guilty of not listening; of not taking heed; of not paying attention; of only truly having brain space for our own planned activity, our own impositions, our own pressures. And children soon learn that you aren’t listening. They soon discover that the adult world is detached from theirs, that they have to do what you want them to do, to jump through the hoop, to follow-the-leader, to tiptoe through the bluebells. Children’s marvel, their desire to invent and their dreams are nothing if they are denied the opportunity to be.