PREVENTION, NOT REPRESSION

Don Bosco’s Educational System

Pietro Braido

Istituto Storico Salesiano – Rome

Studi – 11

January 1999

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. Our summary has no intention of offering immediately applicable programs; we simply wish to describe essential original elements which despite their circumstances and limitations can inspire valid and credible projects now and in the future for very different contexts and settings. This is essential if the legitimate aspiration of working “with Don Bosco and with the times” is to happen without a break in continuity.

This third edition is significantly restructured and expanded; more care has been given to historical data, less space to certain flights of fancy, more light shed on things that might be useful for an inevitable revision and revitalisation, something hinted at by an updated bibliography.

September 12, 1998

Fr Pietro Braido