Chapter 6

Don Bosco's pedagogical originality

With some degree of emphasis and not without reason, a priest from the Fermo diocese wrote the following in l886:

Don Bosco has already been sacrificing his life for the education and instruction of the

young for fifty years. The results of his work are so gratifying and so widespread that Don

Bosco has become the most famous educator of his times, both in the old and in the new

world. What has contributed to his fame is his preventive system.436

It makes no sense to indulge in rhetoric, but the fact is obvious enough that Don Bosco appeared to many of his contemporaries and even later, as an exceptional educator, the emerging representative of the preventive system in the education of youth. However, this does not mean ignoring the fine and original contributions of past educators and those of his time as well.437

C. Danna had a keen intuition, from the outset, of the originality of Don Bosco's educational experience. A professor of literature at the University of Turin, Danna, already in 1849, had written two passionate pages on the Oratory, on Don Bosco's Sunday school. Those two pages underlined the religious and civic nature as well as the holistic educational and cheerful features of the Oratory.

On Sundays and feast days Don Bosco gathers some four or five hundred youngsters over

the age of 8 in an out-of-the-way compound, to keep them from danger and just hanging

around, and to teach them the principles of Christian morality. He does this by entertaining

them with delightful and honest amusements after they have attended pious and religious

practices. He also teaches them social and ecclesiastical history, catechism and the

principles of arithmetic. He trains them to use the metric system and those who do not

know how to are taught how to read and write. All this is done to provide the youngsters

with a moral and civic education. But he does not fail to provide them with a physical

education as well: a fenced-off playground next to the Oratory allows the young to get

involved in gymnastics, play with stilts, swings, skittles or quoits. And this is done to help

them grow and strengthen their physical capacities. Besides prizes of some holy pictures,

lotteries and at times a light breakfast, the bait used to draw the huge crowd of youngsters

is Don Bosco’s own calm approach, always vigilant over the young souls, ready to shed the

light of truth on them and show them how to love one another. Thinking about the harm he

avoids, the vices forestalled, the seeds of virtue sown, the good which is so fruitful, it

436 D. Giordani, La gioventù Don Bosco di Torino, (S. Benigno di Canavese: Tip. E Libreria Salesiana, 1886), 63. At

approximately the same time, by the same author, La carità nell’educare ed il sistema preventivo del più grande

educatore vivente il venerando D. Giovanni Bosco, with the addition of Idee di D. Bosco sull’educazione e

sull’insegnamento, by F. Cerutti, (S. Benigno di Canavese: Tip e Libreria Salesiana, 1886).

437 A brief but very good focus on Don Bosco’s merits regarding the preventive system was provided by E. Valentini,

“Don Bosco restauratore del sistema preventivo”, in Rivista di Pedagogio e Scienze religiose 7 (1969): 285-301. Rather

enthusiastic, instead, is A. Caviglia’s one-sided exuberance. Otherwise a keen scholar of Don Bosco, he said in a

lecture given in August 1934: “Don Bosco and Christian education equate to unity. This is the conceptual and historical

greatness of Don Bosco in the Church’s life: that he offered the definitive formula for Christian pedagogy, for the

pedagogy that the Church desires… Saintly educators all began from the principle of charity, and almost all from

charity towards the poor. But none had widespread and dominant potential like Don Bosco’s. These saints may have

known how to bring everything that religion, charity and wisdom taught together into a system, but there is only one

true creator or ‘diviniser’ of a Christian system of education and that was Don Bosco. (A. Caviglia,La pedagogia di

Don Bosco, in Il soppranaturale nell’educazione, (Rome: An. Tip. Editrice Laziale, 1934), 105 and 108). The tone

explains in parthis declared intention to “speak of Don Bosco…as I see and feel him to be, not as a scholar but as a

Christian and a priest and as a Salesian formed by Don Bosco himself”. 102.