Prevention, not repression
Chapter 7 Don Bosco’s pedagogical formation
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Chapter 7
We can easily recognise the influence of a number of significant life experiences in the educational synthesis developed by Don Bosco. This synthesis is linked, to a great extent, to the same kind of general formation, both personal and cultural, during the early part of his life. The schooling provided by his family and the Church was evident during his infancy-childhood period. His work: in the fields and early schooling formed him during his adolescent period. The Latin school at Chieri, the Seminary and the Convitto Ecclesiastico were the significant factors during his mature youth period, up to the priesthood and beyond. Don Bosco’s future personality, as a priest, a friend of the young, a pastor and as an educator is clearly rooted in these essential features. In fact, the nucleus of Don Bosco’s educative vocation is born and develops with the growing and maturing of his Catholic and priestly formation.478 Don Bosco’s mentality will also have been formed by contact with a network of significant personalities in the Catholic world of his time. There were the saints who were renowned for their works of charity, theologians, people involved in social work, and of course the books he read and his experience of life. All of this would improve and enrich Don Bosco’s personality, already extraordinarily gifted with exceptional emotional, intellectual and moral qualities.
The family was Don Bosco’s first school, his mother his first teacher. Don Bosco’s family came from a small, rural, Catholic community, rich in religious symbolism. The first and the fundamental religious sign was the Sacrament of Baptism, followed in due time by the religious practices laid down by ecclesiastical discipline and blessed by a century-old tradition: daily prayers, Sunday Mass, sermons, catechism, and a host of religious practices.479 The early years of Don Bosco’s family life are marked by the earlier than expected absence of his father, who died when he was hardly two years old; by the presence of the stepbrother seven years older than him; by the presence of his paternal grandmother, and especially by the significant influential presence of a mother, who was gifted with sound humanity and a rich spirituality. She was in reality a fatherly mother.480 Margaret Occhiena (1788-1856) was Don Bosco’s mother. She was the first one to provide Don Bosco with his education: she was Don Bosco’s first teacher. Writing about her, 60 years after her death, Don Bosco says: Her greatest concern was to teach her children religion, training them to be obedient, and keeping them busy, doing what was appropriate at their age.481 It is within his family that Don Bosco, thanks to his mother’s guidance, acquired the habit of prayer, of performing his religious duties, of making sacrifices and, in due time, by the time he reached the age of reason, the habit of regularly going to confession. He was also encouraged to read and write. Don Bosco had to wait until he was eleven years old to be admitted to First Communion (Easter 1827).482. Don Bosco’s personality was strongly influenced and moulded by religion, and by hard work in the family fields and in his neighbours’ fields. While he carried out this work with great determination and out of obedience to his mother, he remained determined to dedicate himself to reading and writing.483 As recorded in The Memoirs of the Oratory of St Francis de Sales Don Bosco attributed great importance to his meeting with Fr John Calosso who, for less than two years, worked as a priest in the Village of Murialdo (1829-1830). Many years later, Don Bosco refers with great clarity to the feelings he had at the age of fifteen.484 However Don Bosco’s recreational activities naturally played a significant part in his formation. His mother encouraged his involvement in games and outdoor pursuits. His interest in games, in looking for bird’s nests and his attempts to be an acrobat all prepared him for his involvement in La società dell’allegria (The Happy Company) of later years, during Don Bosco’s studies at Chieri. His heavy involvement in recreational activities as a young man also accounts for the wide range of activities he assigned to free time in his preventive educative system.485
Don Bosco’s first regular elementary education took place at Castelnuovo: from Christmas 1830 to the summer of 1831, and at Chieri, where he attended the classes of grammar, of the humanities and of rhetoric, from 1831 to 1835. As a preparation for his future, this period is important. The young farmer met the new and exhilarating world of Latin culture in the context of a classical education. The effect of this on Don Bosco was to open his mind to an appreciation of culture, which will prove invaluable in his future work as an educator and as a promoter of vocations. But the most influential feature in the life of Don Bosco, as he was growing up, was the reality of finding himself deeply immersed into a holistic, formative structure, which is at the same time cultural, ethical and religious. We referred earlier to Don Bosco’s preventive repressive kind of soul: it left a deep mark on Don Bosco’s mentality. Evidently, this mentality was compensated for by later experiences, which in turn leave indelible marks in the organisation of his future educational undertakings for students and especially within schools and boarding institutions. 486 This becomes evident not only from the analysis of the text, but also from the clear recollections of his religious experiences as recorded in the Memoirs of the Oratory.487 Don Bosco reflects these same religious and moral foundations in his Preventive System. They can be identified in the value he placed on religious instruction and the practice of religion: the concern he showed for order, discipline and morality, a responsibility he enshrined in the post of the Prefect of Studies and supported by the concept of assistance and the constant reference to an inner formation to be nurtured by the Congregation through spiritual direction and Sacramental praxis. To everything we have mentioned above we should also add that Don Bosco had a keen interest in literature which gave him, as he himself says, an insatiable thirst for classical authors, both Latin and Italian. He almost became infatuated with them.488 Several years later, Don Bosco makes reference to this period by referring to two of his teachers, two priests, as models to be imitated. The first one he singles out with some emphasis is Father Peter Banaudi, whom he describes as a model teacher, one who had successfully made himself feared and loved by all his pupils, without ever using punishments. He loved his pupils as though they were his children and they in turn loved him as a tender father. 489 Don Bosco also considered himself as blessed to have chosen, as his regular confessor a theologian, Father Maloria. This thirty-year-old priest welcomed him with great kindness. He remained Don Bosco’s confessor during the entire course of his theological studies. 490
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