well-behaved, content and sociable: their schooling leads them to recognise an initial step to the practice of a kind way of behaving”.365
6. Antonio Rosmini and his positive, preventive pedagogy
Antonio Rosmini (1797-1855), just like Don Bosco, Dupanloup and others, did not ignore the pedagogical language of the time related to education and its different stages. But his language differed from Don Bosco's and Dupanloup's in his understanding of the verb 'prevent'. For Dupanloup, 'prevent' is only one of the three fundamental tasks of discipline-education. For Don Bosco, the entire educational activity can be understood and carried out as a kind of 'preventing'. Rosmini instead, takes it simply as a condition which precedes the educational activity. 'Educating' for Rosmini, is a much higher and more difficult kind of activity. Rosmini wrote to a priest from Rovereto (Trent, Italy) who had raised the following question366: “How can one make sure that the virtues of boarding school youngsters, are lasting virtues?” In his response, Rosmini forewarned the priest about relying too heavily on 'external', preventive and preparatory means, which have two objectives:1. To remove the occasions of evil; 2. To dispose the spirit to doing good. These means “prepare” the young man to be educated, to receive what is good, but they do not convey what is good, namely, “virtue and grace”. By themselves, preventive means can cause a lot of harm, since they might produce a kind of goodness which is only apparent, a sham which could be easily defined as 'goodness-a-la-boarding school'. This is a kind of goodness which evaporates once the pupil is “no longer enclosed within the sacred walls”. Pure and simple preparatory means may lead a pupil astray. Such means are: the educator's gentle manners, caresses, activity like imitation etc. These might create “misguided intention in the pupils”, and “intention is the eye of the soul giving light to the whole body, as the Divine Master says. Misguided direction does not produce real love of virtue for its own sake at the core of a young man's spirit, virtue loved for its ineffable beauty and intrinsic justice”.367 These preventive and preparatory means are dangerous when they may lead one to believe that “everything depends on them”; “that they are the core of education or the main features of education or that education starts only by using them”. But they are necessary and precious and should be taken into great account “when they are considered only as preparatory steps or preludes to the great work needed to make a young man good”. This work starts, continues and ends only:
1. When the child’s mind is led to know how beneficial truth is if strengthened by grace;
2. When the child is led to contemplate the beauty of the truth that he already knows;
3. When the child is led to fall in love with the beauty of the truth that he contemplates;
4. When one succeeds in having the child act in conformity to the beauty of that truth that he fell in love with”. To achieve all this, only one thing is needed, namely, to place right before the child's intelligence a clear vision of what the moral truth that is we are talking about. After this, the “omnipotent light of this truth can only come from divine grace”. According to the great Christian educator this demands that moral truth be explained to the pupils with “simplicity and coherence” and not in devious or artificial ways”. Jesus Christ, “the great and only master”, is the “exemplar” to be followed and at the same time the source of grace without which the human commitment to education would come to nothing”.368
Notwithstanding the difference of both language and mentality, Don Bosco would have put his
365 F. Aporti, Rapporto, 24 September 1830, in A. Gambaro, Ferrante Aporti e gli asili, vol 2, 21. 366 Letter to Fr Paolo Orsi, 6 May 1836, in A. Rosmini.Srbati, Epistolario completo, vol 5 617-619. 367 A. Rosmini-Serbati, Epistolario, vol 5 618-619.
368 Ibid., 619-621.