National Day of Listening to Minors

As Fondazione Reggio Children, starting from the educational experience of the city of Reggio Emilia, we cannot but welcome the initiative and at the same time ask the question: in a society that is losing the ability to listen, what is Listening?

Carla Rinaldi, Honorary President of the Reggio Children Foundation, reminds us that Listening is ‘openness to differences, to cultures, to points of view’, ‘having the conviction that our knowledge and our being are a small part of a broader and more integrated knowledge’. Listening is trust, silence and respect. Listening ‘does not produce answers, but forms questions’. Listening also contemplates uncertainty, ‘where any truth can only be considered “truth” if it contains an awareness of its limits’.

It is an essential and existential dimension that, as people who work in Fondazione Reggio Children, we try to live and introduce in our educational and research activities, and in our dealings with partners, operators, and beneficiaries, who are above all minors and their families.

The theme of the pedagogy of Listening was the focus of the lecture ‘Education is the answer’ that Carla Rinaldi gave last October at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory of the University of Belgrade, on the occasion of the fourth international conference ‘The Experience of Education’.

To review the lecture, click here.