Chapter 12
Educational disciplines: 1. Performing one's duties; God's grace
Young people's lives evolve and are open to being formed, for Don Bosco. A young life is a growing process necessarily involving an adult educator, surrounding factors, what the educator does. As we have seen, in the network of forces involved in the growing process of the young person, education stands out as the dominant and irreplaceable one. All other resources are effective thanks to the mediation of education. Growing up takes place thanks to educators, in interaction with them, and in obedience to them.
Naturally as Don Bosco's undertakings expanded, they achieved their objectives in different ways and with different approaches depending on the situation of the young people concerned:
- The type of youngster: orphan, abandoned, civilised, seminarian....
- Psychological and moral levels: good character, ordinary character, difficult,bad.
- Kind of institution: festive oratory, evening and Sunday school, religious and recreational
association, boarding school for academic students, hospice for working boys.
There was also the question of communication: press, theatre, music and singing, games,
outings/excursions.
Naturally, there was a basic platform made up of goals, values, contents and methods common to all institutions which resulted in a fundamentally unified preventive system though one which could respond flexibly to real circumstances. But to achieve all this the approaches used need to be different if they were to be appropriate and effective.
Which means that while it is easy enough to work out the aims, it becomes much more difficult to draw up a picture of the variety of approaches by which these aims were to be achieved, given the multitude of different circumstances of young people and the range of institutions offered to deal with them. In the end we can only describe the more significant broad outlines. The next two chapters will take these up. Both will indicate the educational approaches adopted within an overall Christian view of education. In the first chapter, however, we will highlight the religious aspect, while the following chapter will look more closely at human cooperation, while not overlooking the omnipresent divine factor.
1. From obedience of a pedagogical kind to adult social conformity
The royal road, the only one according to Don Bosco, to adult maturity is obedience – listening and then following. During the period of education this is the means and method for arriving at a complete adults social conformity.
Obedience to the educator is the main tool for becoming truly human and Christian, just as the learning of a trade or craft demands dependence on the 'master'. To learn the profession of being human and Christian, everything comes back to the unum necessarium: obedience to God, the Pope, the holy ministers of the Church, or in other words, whatever your state in life, be obedient to whom you must be obedient: father, mother, employer, superior.
It is for this reason that obedience is the virtue which “encompasses all other virtues. It is the virtue which gives rise to and permits other virtues to grow and also safeguards them in such a way that they may never be lost.”877
“The foundation of all virtues in a young man lies in obedience to superiors. Obedience generates and
877G. Bonetti, Memoria di alcuni fatti tratti dalle prediche o dalla storia, end of 1858, pp. 10-11,13,15.