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He was a star, influenced millions of parents, and always remained humble: obituary of pediatrician Remo Largo
Author and songwriter Linard Bardill was a friend of pediatrician and best-selling author Remo Largo, who died at the age of 76. “When I quit, he smiled,” writes Bardill in his tribute.
Pediatrician and author Remo Largo in 2011
“One can despair of the world,” Long Row told me on one of my last visits. Had he become a curmudgeon in old age who had given up hope for a different and better world? I asked myself that and then I asked him.
“No, those who are desperate take themselves too seriously,” he replied. He never considered himself important. But for the parents, to whom he had given hope and clarification in their educational needs with his books, which were published in millions of copies, for these parents he was important, I insisted.
If everyone does what they love and what they can do, the world will be different.
Remo Largo is a star. His books are sold throughout Europe. It is considered a luminary in the field of developmental research for children and adolescents. It has relieved generations of parents from doing everything wrong.
At the same time he was humble and preferred to talk about the garden and the birds than about an interview with Die Zeit or television.
He grew up in relative poverty
Remo Largo grew up in a family with numerous relatives in Winterthur and, despite relative poverty, felt childhood as a paradise and school as an expulsion from it. He skipped the misery of school with reading. It devoured entire libraries. He was always curious about her and still is today.
When he returned to Switzerland after numerous stays in England, Holland and California, he was offered the position of director of the research center for the second longitudinal study of Zurich at the Children’s Clinic of the University of Zurich.
For 27 years he researched and documented the development of more than 900 children from birth to adulthood.
What came out of it was surprisingly simple:
- All children develop according to a common process and schedule, but this schedule is different for each child.
- All children have abilities, but beyond those abilities they cannot be beaten or trained. The only thing that is possible: through pressure, expectation and impatience you can destroy their abilities.
Music and movement were extremely important to Largo, he turned down grades up to sixth grade. I thought the homework was silly. 90 percent is about the relationship with the child, the oxen only bring the experience that you no longer have time to play, there is no time to get to know the other children.
Have these findings really reached our schools?
Sometimes he was angry, with politicians and other things.
You can understand that Long Row could be angry at times. On politicians, over-education and prosperity, which he considered the opposite of prosperity.
As a supporter and initiator of various educational reboots, as well as the free choice of schools, Remo stepped out of the comfort zone of university operations and championed something that seemed doomed from the start: self-organized learning, nice to meet the world at your fingertips. way. Something like this is unimaginable for us Swiss
It’s no wonder such a person is radical. After all, with his studies and more than 100 publications, he always went to the roots of human existence.
Scientific knowledge became a political demand: the child must be able to live his basic needs. These include: physical and mental integrity, social recognition, the ability to live out your talents, perform well, experience security. Only an educational system that guarantees these basic needs has the right to educate.
At age 70 he began his great work
After researching and explaining this balance and the experience of basic needs for all three age groups, which he described as the “Principle of Adjustment”, Rowing Long, now 70, proceeded to his great work: “The Right Life “. He transferred the findings of his research with children to the big world. The book was a great success and sparked a debate across Europe.
“Imagine if people could develop their talents, live their basic needs and become aware of their ideas that it would be the end of war and violence, of poverty and exploitation, a revolution!” He told me the last time. that we meet.
He is not desperate, but tired. And you see that new people are coming, the young people who defend the climate and the young entrepreneurs who are testing the cycle of the economy and sufficiency. He trusts them more than our generation, from basic income to saving the biosphere.
When I put it down, he smiled. No, he wasn’t curmudgeonly, he said, but tired. And grateful to have had such a full and wonderful life.
Remo Largo died Thursday night at the age of 76.
