psychic turmoil and imbalance.1389But it would be wrong to attribute these negative traits which may have come from so many contexts in the family and society to childhood: shortcomings, inter-conjugal and domestic conflict, neglect, hurts, violence, and what might have come from physical and psychic pathologies in the conscious or unconscious. Childhood, recognised as such from its very foundation and in its environment, must unquestionably be the primary and privileged reference point for a responsible preventive education.
10. Anyone who professionally deals with the successive stages of youth development, should first of all beware of any mythologising the age of adolescence, ignoring its previous historical period or stage. The literature which inspired Don Bosco to write The Companion of Youth might lead someone to understand adolescence in Rousseau's terms at least partially and unconsciously, as an immaculate 'second birth', a 'new beginning', without any inherited debts or strings attached. During this stage, positive potential intertwines with the shortcomings and deficiencies due to the education or bad education, or lack of education preceding it. Childhood and adolescent psychopathology aims precisely at separating the apparent anomalies due to the growing process itself from pathologies with fardistant roots already set in motion and in need of psychotherapeutic and educational interventions.1390The prevention offered initially (Primary Prevention) might also at times turn into prevention which is good for the years to follow (Secondary prevention). Following this line of development, we could hold to the conviction that Don Bosco's initial preventive experience, essentially of the primary type, might be extended to all the circumstances of human growth, even to the most complex ones up to the second and third levels.
At any rate, right from the beginning, the preventive system was exercised at both pedagogical and positive levels and also at the level of social assistance, by different interventions, to the point that they seem much more appropriate now than they were then.1391
12. (NB, 11 was skipped in the original Italian text!)
The fact of having the same final goal, a multiplicity of objectives and different paths to follow means
first of all a diversified and qualitative articulation of the final goal. This final goal can be legitimately
expressed and summed up in the classic term 'Salvation'. It could also be equated with holiness, if this
is not identified with canonised holiness or the like but taken in its the original sense: “To live in Christ, to be in a habitual state of grace,” have a permanent awareness of one's Christian dignity as a child of God, even though at times a 'prodigal' child of God.
As far as the various levels of belonging to the Kingdom of God on earth are concerned, Don Bosco, as we have already remarked, wrote of them in his Historical Outlines (1862), jotting down the balance sheet of twenty years work among the boys. What he wrote is significant and open to broader development.1392 It deals with concrete initial hints to som e sort of differentiated pedagogy. We can
speak about it and even begin the different requirements presented to the young in different educational
institutional settings: the oratory, the boarding school, the hospice and the Minor Seminary.
13. There is an other difference to be considered with regard to education and it is related to two
fundamental pedagogical directions:
- The individualised or rather personalised aspect of the educational journey, in reference to the
1389 M. Montessori, L'intelligenza absorbante and L'umiltà del mondo attraverso il bambino: interventions at the VIII
International Montessori Congress, San Remo, 22-29 August 1949, pp. 369-383 and 528-537.
1390 V.L. Castellazzi, Psicopatologia dell'infanzia e dell'adolescenza: Le nervosi. Rome, LAS 1988, 156 p.; Le psicoso.
Ibid. 1991, 159 p.,; La depressione, Ibid, 1993, 174 p.
1391 As indicated in the bibliography, the perceptive contributions of Giancarlo Milanesi and others are significant in
this order of thinking. They have seen how to understand and re-propose – theoretically and practically – the preventive
system as something multidisciplinary, historical, sociological, psychological, pedagogical.
1392 Cf. Chap 11, §4 and 5 and Chap 13, §6.