Gianfranco Zavalloni He is an Italian teacher and pedagogue who defends that children have to take advantage of all experiences to learn and develop skills, discovering their own path. After more than 20 years of work looking for the best ways to teach, to improve the condition of childhood created a kind of "manifesto" with ten principles that claim the natural rights of children.
To enumerate these principles, the author put himself in the place of children, looking for his childhood memories. Wondering what he liked to do as a child, what were his favorite games, where were he and his friends going to play, what were his rights then, if he knew them or not and who were in charge of keeping them.
Through these answers it clarifies the basic needs of children, many of them everyday and universal experiences, others forgotten or relegated by our current way of life ... And that can be summed up in a premise: let children be children.
And sometimes we are more worried if they get dirty, because we do not have time, or there is no suitable place for them to play, we put obstacles to their explorations, we have forgotten physical activity, we do not know the natural world in the first person ... In short, we are (we are not) losing many things and we move away from our own nature.
The natural rights of children according to Gianfranco Zavalloni
These are the ten premises that claim the natural rights of children:
Right to leisure To live moments not programmed by adults.
Right to get dirty. To play with sand, earth, grass, leaves, water, branches and stones.
Right to smells. To perceive the smell and to recognize the perfumes of nature.
Right to dialogue. To listen and to take the floor, to dialogue.
Right to use hands. To nail nails, to saw, to glue, to model clay, to tie ropes, to light a fire.
Right to a good start. To eat healthy food from birth, to drink clean water and to breathe fresh air.
Right to the street. To play freely in the squares, to walk in the street.
Right to the wild. To build a shelter in which to play in the forest, to have reeds in which to hide, trees to climb.
Right to silence To hear the wind that blows, the song of the birds, the twitter of the water.
Right to nuances. To see the sun rise and set, to see the moon and the stars at night.
I wish all these points could be fulfilled, but some sound so impossible in our environment ... There is the project to translate the Manifesto into 100 different leagues, and that is that they are ideas that can be exported to any part of the world, or is it not Equal childhood, whatever its origin?
Desirable ideas that would bring our children closer to Nature, to the game, to us, to the happiness of enjoying their childhood, to experiment through the senses, and that we find compiled in the Manifesto with the natural rights of children by Gianfranco Zavalloni.
