Every Reggio Emilia preschool in the world traces its roots back to one man and one bicycle ride. This week we're kicking off our Reggio Spotlight Series, a weekly deep dive into the people, ideas, and research behind the philosophy that shapes everything we do. Starting at the beginning.

Loris Malaguzzi was born in 1920 in Correggio, a small town in northern Italy. He trained as a teacher and later earned a degree in psychology, but his defining experience was not academic. It was witnessing what happened to his country during World War II.

In 1945, just days after the war ended, he heard that a group of parents in the village of Villa Cella, just outside Reggio Emilia, had begun building a school out of the rubble of the war. Literally. They were selling a tank, a few horses, and some trucks left behind by the retreating German army, and using the money to build a place for their children. Malaguzzi rode his bicycle out to see it for himself.

He was 25 years old. And he never really left.

What Malaguzzi built over the next four decades was not a curriculum. It was a philosophy, one rooted in the belief that children are born with an extraordinary capacity for learning, creativity, and expression, and that the role of education is not to fill them up but to get out of their way. He believed that the environment, relationships, and community were teachers in their own right. He believed that children deserved to be taken seriously.

He spent years fighting for public funding for early childhood education in Italy at a time when it was not considered a serious priority. He built a network of municipal preschools in Reggio Emilia that became the most studied early childhood program in the world. And in 1991, Newsweek named the Diana School in Reggio Emilia one of the ten best schools on the planet.

Every Reggio Emilia-inspired daycare and preschool operating today, including ours, is building on what Malaguzzi started in that bombed-out village in 1945. He died in 1994, but the philosophy he built out of wartime rubble and a bicycle ride is very much alive. ❤️

🔦 Reggio Spotlight Series, Week 1: Who was Loris Malaguzzi?