omnia suffert, omnia sperat, omnia sustinet, Love is patient and kind,... love bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. With charity, reason and religion are the tools the educator should constantly use, teach, and himself put it into practice if he wants to be obeyed and achieve his goal”.1032 In other words the statements made by Don Bosco mean to show educators what their qualities and virtues should be. But they are all practically reduced to one: an educative charity, methodologically expressed in the threefold form of reason, faith and amorevolezza or loving kindness.

1. The educator, individual and community, is the key player in the educational process

The entire preventive method is entrusted to the educator. In the description of the “two systems used throughout history in the education of youth”, one can detect the different weight given the educator as part of the three main forces that apply in education: the law, rules – superior, rector, assistant, and the dependents, the pupils. Paradoxically it seems that in the repressive system the executive responsibility is almost entirely in the hands of the pupil. The superior, the educator, besides having the task of vigilance, wields the power of judgment or punishment.

In the preventive system instead, the absolute key player is the educator who holds all power: the executive, the judiciary and punitive. The pupil, instead, is called to an essentially cooperative execution, a subordinate, shared role.

Don Bosco speaks and writes about the preventive system to adult educators. The two letters dated from Rome and edited by Father John Baptist Lemoyne under the inspiration of his superior, are remarkable precisely because substantially the preventive burdens and obligations should have been the content of only one letter, the one addressed to the Salesians at Valdocco. The ‘system’ is entirely based on them; it works or does not work depending on whether or not they bear its weight and guarantee its fruitfulness.

It is for this reason that the Salesians at Valdocco are called to be totally consecrated to their pupils as father, brother and friend, sharing their life much like the adult members in a family. They are fathers, mothers, brothers and more so friends, with an additional emotional element which transcends the family itself and leads to relationships of a superior quality which can reach the pupils' consciences. They achieve their highest level in the person of the Rector who is also a father and confessor. Practically, the system is based on the reason, religion and loving kindness of the educator – individual and community – and through him, all the pedagogical elements which he uses or acts as mediates. The pupils will never be mature – through useof the values of reason, religion and loving kindness – unless the educator is himself value and method based on reason, religion and loving kindness.

The educator/teacher is called upon to present himself as an active, living model of values, of everything that is that reason, religion and loving kindness offer as valid and which the educator can make lovable, attractive, motivating, a driving force for the pupil.

The educator is to be an energetic model of morality, according to Don Bosco, in relation to all the likely educational objectives.

We can, however, establish, as an invariable principle, that the morality of the pupils

depends on the morality of the one who teaches them, assists them and guides them. 'One

cannot give whatever one does not have' so the proverb goes. An empty sack cannot

produce wheat, nor can a flask full all dregs provide good wine. And so, before we present

ourselves as teachers to others, it is essential for us to possess what we want to teach

others.1033

1032 Il sistema preventivo (1877). p. 52, OE XXVIII 430 1033 Circular already cited, of 5 Feb. 1874, OE E II 347.