The pages written in 1877 convey, first of all, what Don Bosco thought was the dominant feature of the youthful age, and the most decisive reason for adopting the preventive system:
The primary reason for this system is the thoughtlessness of the young, who in one moment
forget the rules of discipline and the penalties for their infringement. Consequently a child
often becomes culpable and deserving of punishment, which he had not even thought about
and which he had quite forgotten when heedlessly committing the fault he would certainly
have avoided, had a friendly voice warned him.726
This feature is strictly connected with a second typical feature: lack of experience, immat urity, and as a consequence, lack of consideration and lack of prudence. For Don Bosco youth, taken in the widest
sense, is by definition “dangerously inexperienced” and therefore “unstable” and “careless”.727 Therefore, youth can easily be trapped by snaresof all kinds and from all sources: from the devil, bad companions, gaudy or alluringly presented things, temptations, freedom, heresy. It is mainly for this reason that youth is “an age exposed to dangers which can be found in every social circumstance”.728 'Which children should be considered at risk' is the title of a paragraph written in a memo on the preventive system and handed to Francis Crispi in February of l878.729
The very root of youth’s thoughtlessness can be found in an innate lack of organisation which affects youth's psychological existence and precedes any kind of educational intervention. “Youngsters, just because they lack instruction and reflection allow themselves, often blindly, to be dragged by some of their friends or by their lack of reflection into bad behaviour, sinply they have been neglected”.730 Connected with this is a characteristic trait which Don Bosco repeated time and again: Young people are flighty, unable to keep to their commitments, fragile, easily get tired, are just as easily discouraged as they become enthusiastic about something”.731
In the life of St. Dominic Savio, Don Bosco writes: “It is a particular trait of youth to be flighty, namely to easily change one's resolve about what one wants to achieve; and it is not a thing that happens seldom. Today a young man decides to do one thing and the next day he does another one; today he practices virtue to an eminent degree and the next day, he does just the opposite”.732
Naturally, this turns out to be even more evident when a young man has to face something which demands seriousness and commitment: this is the case with religion, piety, study, work and discipline. In the Life of Besucco, Don Bosco emphasises how difficult it is for a youngster to “learn how to have a taste for prayer. Their fickle age causes them to see anything which demands serious mental attention as something nauseating and even as an enormous weight.733
726Il sistema preventivo (1877), p. 48, OE XXVIII 426. Any emphases are mine.
727Cf. Fatti contemporanei esposti in forma di dialogo. Turin, De-Agostini 1853, p. 3, OE V 53; Lo spazzacammino. Turin
Oratory of St Francis de Sales Printshop 1866, p. 62, OE XVII 174; Il Galantuomo. Almanacco per il 1873. Turin
Oratory of St Francis de Sales Printshop 1872, p. 5, OE XXV 5; “remove fickle and careless young people from sin”;
G. Bosco, Severino ossia avventure di un giovane alpigiano. Turin Oratory of St Francis de Sales Printshop 1868, p. 4,
OE XX 4; “Le mie sciagure servano ad altri d'avviso per avitare gli scogli che conducano alla rovina tanta inesperta
gioventù”; BS 2 (1878) no 3. March, p. 12, 1q3.
728G. Bosco. La forza della buona educazione... p. 55, OE VI 329.
729Cf Il sistema preventivo (1878), RSS 4 (1985) 301-302.
730 Il sistema preventivo (1878), RSS 9 (1985) 300; going to the prisons Don Bosco had noticed that “a great number of
children considered their punishment less than the fact they were abandoned and not given consideration” (G. Bosco
L'Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales ospizio di beneficenza. Turin. Salesian Printshop 1879. p. 3, OE XXI 259. 731P. Stella, Don Bosco nella storia della religiosità cattolica, Vol II, p. 190.
732G. Bosco, Vita del giovanetto Savio Domenico allievo dell'Oratorio di San Francesco di Sales. Turin. G.B. Pravia &
Co. 1859, p. 37, OE XI 187.
733G. Bosco, Il pastorello delle Alpi ovvero Vita del giovane Besucco Francesco d'Argentera. Turin, Oratory of St Francis
de Sales Printshjop 1864, pp. 113-114, OE XV 355-356.