system:
First of all the presentation of the proper pedagogical element of the preventive system does not cover its entire range. In fact, it also includes a clear pastoral and spiritual dimension both in reference to educators and those to be educated.
Secondly, to adequately use Don Bosco's writings which are the expression and dimension of its entire lived experience, we should interpret their explicitly pedagogical contents when necessary. These, in turn, should be connected with other appropriate elements: theological, juridical, hagiographical, spiritual, asceticand organisational.446
2.2 Life’s integrating role in any reconstruction of the preventive system
There is a huge quantity of Don Bosco's writings which owe their existence to his radical aim of championing the improvement of the young and the masses. They end up being incomprehensible or even misleading, even theoretically, if not connected with his personality and with the real life of the institutions he created and governed.
This does not mean the preventive system is to be precisely equated with Don Bosco himself. Undoubtedly, Don Bosco's outstanding personality as a clever and holy educator gives the system a particular tone of its own, but the system takes on its own structure and validity. It even becomes a doctrine to be handed on, and it was actively handed on firstly to his own immediate co-workers and to the various groups working in the field of youth assistance. Don Bosco and his followers ended up clearly setting the preventive system, with its structure and effectiveness, against another doctrine and educational praxis, the repressive system.
It does not exclude, but implies rather that the best interpreter of Don Bosco for theorising and writing about the preventive system is Don Bosco himself. It is he who creates and moulds his educational experience and enfleshes it in his own institutions together with all his co-workers and young people who are the first and most active beneficiaries of the system. Bartholomew Fascie wrote: “One who approaches Don Bosco's education system with the idea of subjecting it to painstaking analysis, dissecting it, dividing it into many parts, rigid patterns, is following the wrong lead. Don Bosco’s method of education should be looked at as a living form in its entirety, by studying the principles which gave origin to its life, its bodies, its vitality, and the functions developed from them”.447
2.3 Relationship between stability and innovation in the preventive system
The attention given to the historical, contextual and vital nature of the preventive system should help remove the possibility of its reconstruction being too rigid and uniform. In fact Don Bosco's educational experience and the theoretical reflection accompanying it occurred at a considerably different time and in a different social, environmental and institutional context.
The years prior to l848 and the birth of Italian national unity (l860), as well as the Piedmontese period of expansion of Don Bosco's undertakings (up to l870), are not easily identifiable either in themselves or in the years and periods that immediately followed. The psychological climate, cultural impulses, social conditions and political and religious contexts appear to have been radically different. Besides, even within these periods there cannot be any comparison with the experiences Don Bosco had at the
446 R. Farina provides valid criteria for reading Don Bosco’s literary production in” Leggere Don Bosco oggi. Note e
suggestioni metodologiche”, in La formazione permanente interpella gli Istituti religiosi, ed. P. Broccardo, (Leumann-
Torino: Elle Di Ci 1976), 349-404.
447 B. Fascie, Del metodo educativo di Don Bosco. Fonti e commenti, (Turin: SEI, 1927), 32. On the relationship between
writings and personal and institutional experience as a criterion for understanding Don Bosco’s educational system, cf.,
P. Braido, Il sistema preventivo di Don Bosco; and” Los escritos en la experiencia pedagógica de don Bosco” in: San
Juan Bosco, Obras fundamentales, edición dirigada por Juan Canals Pujol y Antonio Martínez Azcona, (Madrid: BAC
1978), 14-32.