The Hundred Languages of Children

After WWII the women of Reggio Emilia, a small city in northern Italy, sold a tank, a few trucks, and some horses left behind by the retreating German army and used the money to build a school. They wanted something completely different from the fascist education their children had just lived through — a school built on democratic participation, on the belief that children are competent and curious and rights-bearing from birth, on the idea that young children have not one language but a hundred: painting, clay, wire, movement, music, shadow, light, drama, conversation, silence. The Reggio Emilia approach they built became one of the most influential early childhood education philosophies in the world. This anthology — essays, documentation, photographs, children's work — is the definitive account of what that philosophy looks like in practice. If someone asks what DoCR is trying to build, this book is the answer with photographs. Every child who passes through a Reggio-inspired program learns that their way of knowing the world is valid, that their hundred languages are worth speaking, that the adults around them are genuinely curious about what they think. That is the DoCR promise. Reggio has been keeping it since 1945.