to grasp the features of a 'pedagogy of the poor', or 'poor pedagogy'. “These traits are the sincerity of friendships, trust placed in the teachers, the experience of community life like at home in the family, seasoned by loving kindness, evangelical openness to the gifts of grace, appreciation for study and profession, fascination for games and activities, theatre and the like, which were generally not accessible to the family environment the youngsters had come from.

For the vast majority of youngsters, life at boarding school was not something taken for granted, a necessity created by family circumstances or by social status but good fortune, an unexpected gift, an unforeseen and stupendous opportunity for social and cultural growth, the starting point of a new course towards the future.

Most of the best requirements of the system found in the boarding school the best locus for their implementation, above all the fundamental requirement of prevention in its twofold aspect: protective- preparatory and positive-constructive. It is precisely the concern for prevention which gives origin to the boarding school-boarding house:

Among the young who attend the city oratory are some who are in such a situation that all

the spiritual means provided for them would be useless were their temporal needs not

responded to.1283

When I came to realise that for many boys, any work undertaken on their behalf would turn out to be useless if I were not to give them shelter, I took great pains to rent more and more rooms in a hurry, even though the cost was extremely high.

1284

Later on for reasons of pedagogical prevention Don Bosco adopted the rigid approach of the boarding school both for the working boys and the academic students, introducing workshops and classes to the Oratory premises.

Since we had no workshops, our pupils used to go to work and do their schooling in Turin,

with great detriment to morality due to the fact that the companions they met along the way,

the language they heard and what they saw made what we were doing for them and

we said to them at the Oratory useless.

1285

what

What was happening to the working boys, lamentably was happening also to the academic students. For this reason, for the classesthey had been divided into, the more advanced in studies had to be sent to Profess or Joseph Bonzanino; Rhetoric students Professor Matthew Picco.These were excellent schools, but going to and coming from school was full of

dangers. In 1856, the school and the workshops were definitively established at the

Oratory.

1286

Clearly, a pedagogy o f preservation and 'immunisation' seems to be the ideal for a moral educational

structure without breaking its continuity. Don Bosco prefers to build educational structure on 'virgin

territory rather than on land which needs preliminary restoration and cle aring. He does not reject the second hypothesis but he does not do anything to put it into practice.

1283 Piano di regolamento per la casa annessa all'Oratorio di S. Francesco di Sales in Valdocco. Scopo di questa, a

manuscript from 1852 kept in the Salesian Central Archives in Rome. Don Bosco wrote about the question in the Cenni

storici: “Amongst the young people who frequent these oratories there are some who are so poor and abandoned that

any concern for them was almost useless unless there was a place to live, food, clothing. We provided this with the

home attached to the Oratory of St Francis de Sales”. (Cenni storici..., in P. Braido (Ed), Don Bosco nella Chiesa..., pp.

74-75.).

1284 MO (1991) 182

1285 MO (1991) 187

1286 MO (1991) 187-188.