legal, moral, religious.
The family may become the paradigm of 'renewal in continuity' for the preventive system, in preference to the formalised model of a closed system such as the boarding institution or school. The oratory, associations and groups are forms very close to it. We need to invent a concrete and articulate preventive family-like pedagogy and re-apply the key concepts of the system (carefully, in view of changed circumstances) especially loving kindness, oscillating between affective creativity, a reassuring sense of belonging and concern for possessiveness and violence.
If the family can rightly be considered the actual cradle of the preventive system it also calls for an ongoing regeneration, education and preventive re-education. Radical changes are needed today [on behalf of the family] and they have to be of a welfare, political and social character, but it is impossible for preventive educators not to also include educational and re-educational interventions, therapeutic interventions even, on behalf of anyone aspiring to marriage and the mission of transmitting life. These interventions should take place before, during and after creating a conjugal and family community. 18. Finally, it becomes inevitably essential for preventive educators to have renewed readiness to learn. This is the primordial condition for proclaiming (though not yet defining) a 'new preventive system'. Besides all the earlier mentioned circumstances, there also must be a recourse to the human sciences and in particular to the education sciences. These have made an immeasurable progress since Don Bosco's times. We cannot do without them at all epistemological levels, at time when all pedagogical thinking, whatever leaning it may have, is at a painstaking stage of critical reflection.
Even given the multiplicity of preventive interventions, the preventive system understood as pedagogy and pastoral ministry is subject to all the tensions which characterise the epistemological basis of science or of the sciences of educational and pastoral activity.1402
And the reality of youth with its vast gamut of situations and problems is still more pressing than the
theory.
1403
Don Bosco's fundamentally dogmatic system was not only drawn from general ant hropological and theological principles. His experience as an educator, and the formulation it received reveal a pedagogy
which is, to some extent experimental, but an experimental pedagogy which was practised, evaluated,
improved upon tirelessly in the pe dagogical laboratory which we know as the Oratory in Valdocco and
the institutions which branched out from the Mother House.
1404
1402 Cf. C. Nanni, Pedagogia in discussione, in «Orientamenti pedagogici» 36 (1989) 890-914; C. Volpi, Paideia '80.
L'educabilità nell'era del post-moderno. Naples, Tecnodid 1988, 162 p.; F. Cambi, R. Fornaca, G. Cives, Complessità,
pedagogia crtica, educazione democratica. Florence, La Nuova Italia 1991,III-23e4 p.; A Granese, Il labirinto e la
porta stretta. Saggio di pedagogia critica. Florence, La Nuova Italia 1993, VIII-399 p.; G. Acone, Declino
dell'educazione e tramonto d'epoca. Brescia, La Scuola 1994, 268 p.
1403 Cf Ripartire dalla strada (Turin, SEI 1997), cited in the bibliography, the pertinent insistences of Domenico Ricca:
I salesiani nel pianeta minori (pp. 28-29): I salesiani nel pianeta tossicodipendenza (pp. 137-157).
1404 Cf. P. Braido, Pedagogia perseverante tra sfide e scommesse, in «Orientamenti Pedagogici» 38 (1991) 906-911.