Chapter 15
The educative 'family'
The preventive system, understood broadly, is open to all kinds of educational, re-educational circumstances. Don Bosco did not apply his system only in the classic institutions: oratory, hospice, boarding house, boarding school, association, group. He did so in individual encounters as well; it was there,too, in his publishing undertakings. It was Don Bosco's behavioural style in the widest range of social relationships, with people of all ages and circumstance. It is not only in the Confidential Memo to Rectors that we can find rules Don Bosco gave on relationships with outsiders. They can be found also in the Memo for missionaries who had to face various life situations.
The preventive system is valid not only for one-on-one education, for stronger personalised relationships, but also for mass education.1084
However, wherever many people were gathered in community, that was the 'place 'where the preventive
system took shape, and the result was that the preventive system is, to a large measure, the system for
community. This is what this chapter is about.
1. The family paradigm
Don Bosco's preventive system took shape prevalently within communities of young people, communities with a wider dimension such as: oratories, hospices, boarding institutions, boarding schools, schools for day students. So it is primarily a program related to the pedagogy of the environment.1085
Notwithstanding all of the above, in Don Bosco's mind and praxis the preventive system anticipates
with the same clarity that every educational ins titution should take the family as its model, adapted
according to circumstance. “Don Bosco's Oratory”, writes one scholar, “was meant to be a home, a 'family', and not simply a boarding school.”1086 “The 'Lives' written by Don Bosco”, the same scholar continues, “continue the effect, in the minds of the young readers for whom they were written, of the good example which gradually shapes what is called the environment, the climate, the atmosphere surrounding the boys Don Bosco had gathered around himself in his early days, in a 'home’ which was meant to be a 'family' ”.1087
This family atmosphere was demanded by the very essence of the system inasmuch as it is preventive and founded on reason, religion and loving kindness. There can never be 'loving kindness’ -which polarises reason and religion methodically - unless a calm and exemplary 'environment' is created, namely, a family climate.
This automatically means that even its structure should have some similarity to the family. Only this kind of family-like structure could have enabled the blossoming of trust between pupils and superiors, not really seen as superiors but as fathers and brothers, the blossoming of an affectionate sharing of life with the boys as brothers and friends, and finally the blossoming of solidarity among all of them.1088
1084 Fr Mario Barbera (Turin, SEI 1942) dedicates the first chapter in his San Giovanni Bosco educatore, to Don Bosco
“educator of the masses”: this inspired the essay Don Bosco educatore delle moltitudini, in «Civiltà Cattolica» 139
(1988) II 230-244.
1085 Cf. H. Bouquier, Don Bosco Éducateur, Paris, Téqui 1950, chap 9. L'éducation problème de milieu, pp. 1-2; A.
Caviglia, Domenico Savio e Don Bosco. Studio, p. 286.
1086 A. Caviglia, Il «Magone Michele»..., p. 141.
1087 A. Caviglia, La vita di Besucco Francesco..., pp. 157-158.
1088 “Don Bosco”, write3s Franz Xavier Eggersdorfer, “can be taken as a paradigm of the shaping power of the
environment. A good family was the dominating factor in his educational approach in his communities”