Pietro Braido – “Prevention, not repression. Don Bosco’s educational system”

Don Bosco’s educational system or, more comprehensively, Don Bosco’s preventive experience, is a project: it grew, gradually expanded and became more specific in the different and various institutions and undertakings carried out by his many collaborators and disciples.

Understandably, its vitality can be guaranteed in time only by being faithful to the law which governs any authentic growth: renewal, in-depth study, adaptation in continuity. The renewal is entrusted to the persistent on-going theoretical and practical commitment of individuals and communities. Renewal never ceases. Continuity, instead, can be assured only by a keen engagement with the origins. The aim of our rapid summary is to provoke an enlivening contact with the primitive roots of Don Bosco’s preventive experience as well as its features.

Il “sistema educativo” o, più comprensivamente, l’esperienza preventiva di don Bosco è un progetto, che è cresciuto e si è progressivamente dilatato e specificato nelle più svariate istituzioni e opere realizzate dai molti collaboratori e discepoli. È ovvio che la sua vitalità operativa può essere garantita nel tempo soltanto dalla fedeltà alla legge di ogni autentica crescita: il rinnovamento, l’approfondimento, l’adattamento, nella continuità. Il rinnovamento resta affidato al persistente e ripetuto impegno teorico e pratico dei singoli e delle comunità. È compito sempre aperto. La continuità, invece, può essere assicurata soltanto dall’alacre confronto con le origini. Provocare un vivificante contatto con le “radici” primitive dell’esperienza preventiva di don Bosco e dei suoi tratti fondamentali è lo scopo della presente rapida sintesi.

INDEX:

•  Presentation
•  Introduction
• Chapter 1 – Don Bosco’s times
  • 1. Elements and contributing to political change
  • 2. Circumstances in the religious area
    • 2.1 The situation in the Catholic Church
    • 2.2 The situation of the Church in Turin
  • 3. Change in the socio-economic area
  • 4. Changes in cultural, educational and scholastic areas
• Chapter 2 – Better to prevent than repress
  • 1. Political prevention
  • 2. Social prevention: paupers and beggars
  • 3. Prevention in the penal field
  • 4. Education as prevention
  • 5. Religion as prevention
• Chapter 3 – Prevention existed before the Preventive System
  • 1. Preventive themes related to post-Tridentine family education
  • 2. Charles Borromeo, first champion of oratorian pedagogy
  • 3. The fear-love alternative in governing a religious community
  • 4. Jansenistic pedagogy: Port Royal (1637-1657)
  • 5. Preventive repression in school education
• Chapter 4 – Birth of a formula: Preventive system, repressive system
  • 1. Prevention and repression in school policy
  • 2. Public repressive and private preventive education
  • 3. Pierre Antoine Poullet’s Preventive System (1810-1846)
  • 4. A comparison between two types of college-boarding school and two systems of education
  • 5. Felix Dupanloup (1800-1878)
  • 6. The Preventive suggestions of Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861)
  • 7. Antoine Monfat, educator and pedagogue (1820-1898)
• Chapter 5 – Preventive system personalities known directly or indirectly to Don Bosco
  • 1. The Cavanis brothers
  • 2. Lodovico Pavoni
  • 3. Marcellin Champagnat (1789-1840) and the Marist Brothers
  • 4. Teresa Eustochio Verzeri and the Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
  • 5. The Preventive system in infant schools
  • 6. Antonio Rosmini andd his positive, preventive pedagogy
  • 7. Correctional education: somewhere between preventive and repressive
  • 8. De La Salle’s preventive pedagogy
  • 9. The Barnabites’ Preventive style
• Chapter 6 – Don Bosco’s pedagogical originality
  • 1. A biographical outline
  • 2. Reconstructing Don Bosco’s Preventive System: sources
    • 2.1 Don Bosco, Christian Apostle of the Young
    • 2.2 Life’s intergrating role in any reconstruction of the Preventive System
    • 2.3 Relationship between stability and innovation in the Preventive System
  • 3. Don Bosco, educator and author of pedagogical literature
• Chapter 7 – Don Bosco’s pedagogical formation
  • 1. Family and Church
  • 2. Early schooling
  • 3. Seminary life in Chieri
  • 4. At the Convitto Ecclesiastico
  • 5. Congenial saints
  • 6. The oratory experience
  • 7. Don Bosco and pedagogues who contributed to “The Primary School Teacher”
  • 8. Books about the spiritual guidance of youth
  • 9. A teacher constantly ‘open learning’
  • 10. The impact of Turin’s youth
• Chapter 8 – The works, the heart, the style
  • 1. The works
  • 2. Personality and style
    • 2.1 Tradition and modernity
    • 2.2 Realism and timeliness
    • 2.3 Wisdom and firmness
    • 2.4 Large-hearted and practical
    • 2.5 “Completely consecrated” to the young
    • 2.6 A man with a heart
  • 3. Everything for God
• Chapter 9 –  The option for the young: social and psycho-pedagogical typology
  • 1. Elements of the sociology of youth
  • 2. Elements of youth psychology
    • 2.1 Growing up
    • 2.2 Features of youth psychology
  • 3. Theology of education
• Chapter 10 – Ways suggested for helping boys with special problems
  • 1. Don Bosco with young detainees at the Generala
  • 2. Don Bosco’s interest in young people with problems
  • 3. Don Bosco’s negotiations regarding the way correctional institutions should be run
  • 4. A preventive project for boys at risk
• Chapter 11 – Educating the “good Christian and upright citizen” according to the “needs of the times”
  • 1. Theoretical and practical view of educational goals
  • 2. A humanist and Christian view somewhere between che ‘old’ and the ‘new’ educational goals
  • 3. Basic polarity and hierarchy of educational goals
  • 4. Meaning of life, ‘salvation’ to be rediscovered and bolstered
  • 5. Steps required to be saved
  • 6. Love and fear of God expressed through service
  • 7. Young people in the Catholic Church
  • 8. The Christian, “Man for eternity” but active in the world 
  • 9. Society
  • 10. Life is vocation and mission
  • 11. Common vocation: charity and apostolate
  • 12. A life style seasoned with hope and joy
• Chapter 12 – Educational disciplines: (1) Performing one’s duties; God’s grace
  • 1. From obedience of a pedagogical kind to adult social conformity
  • 2. Pedagogy based on ‘duty’
  • 3. Prime of place for religious education
  • 4. Teaching fear as a prelude to love
  • 5. Practises of piety in religious education
  • 6. Sacramental pedagogy in general and specifically the Eucharist
  • 7. Sin and the sacrament of reconciliation
  • 8. A Marian and devotional pedagogy
  • 9. Initiation to a ‘sensus ecclesiae’ and fidelity to the Pope
• Chapter 13 – Education disciplines: (2) Virtue and commitment
  • 1. Practising charity, mortification and politeness
  • 2. The queen of virtues: chastity and its pedagogy
  • 3. Pedagogy of vocational choise
  • 4. The pedagogy of the ‘last things’
  • 5. Education to hope and joy
  • 6. Signs of a differentiated and contextual pedagogy
  • 7. Unresolved adolescent problems
• Chapter 14 – “This system is entirely based on reason, religion and loving kindness”
  • 1. The educator, individual and community, is the key player in the educational process
  • 2. This threefold foundation has a relational unity
  • 3. Loving kindness: a term with many connotations
  • 4. The basis of amorevolezza: religion and charity, reason and friendship
  • 5. The educational abundance of loving kindness
  • 6. Loving kindness becomes Salesian spirit
• Chapter 15 – The educative ‘family’
  • 1. The family paradigm
  • 2. Family style
  • 3. Family structure: the rector and his co-helpers
    • 3.1 The Rector
    • 3.2 The community of teachers, educators
  • 4. The mobile world of the young
    • 4.1 Relationship between respect and gradual autonomy
    • 4.2 Giving some structure to a community of young people: sodalities
• Chapter 16 – The pedagogy of joy and festivity
  • 1. Joy
  • 2. Feast days
  • 3. Theatre
  • 4. Music and singing
  • 5. Outsings and walks
• Chapter 17 – Demanding love: “a word on punishments”
  • 1. The basis for a practice of correction and punishment
  • 2. Fear which comes from love
  • 3. The role of the superior, rules as the concrete embodiment of duty, initiation into responsability
  • 4. Corrections
  • 5. On punishments
  • 6. Dismissal and expulsion
  • 7. Rewards
• Chapter 18 – Educational institutions
  • 1. The oratory
  • 2. Home and boarding school (collegio)
  • 3. The minor seminary
  • 4. The school
    • 4.1 Humanities
    • 4.2 The working boys and their formation
    • 4.3 Religious education
  • 5. Forming the educators
• Chapter 19 – Towards tomorrow
  • 1. Modernity’s educational revolution
  • 2. Restoration, reinvention, building
• Bibliography

Reference time period: 1700 – 1888

Reference institution:
Istituto Storico Salesiano