The Preventive System is centered on the child or young person and the limits of his/her age, and so, with the assiduous and loving assistance of the educator, present paternally or maternally, he or she advises and supports. Today this is the pedagogy of reciprocity, where empathy is that act which allows one to look at the other with warmth, affection and sympathy, that is, to understand the other with a human gaze, to welcome the other with a human word, where one considers the other, not as an object, but as a subject.
Prevention today becomes the offer of alternatives that lead the student to make significant decisions for his or her life. It is an educational system that goes far beyond the linear repressive system which, since Don Bosco's time, already directed the educator to be a mere executor of orders.
The novelty of the Preventive System is based on its loyalty to the inspirational sources, which deal with the concern to make the full humanity of the child and young person a reality, starting from the recognition of their perfectibility.
Starting from an entirely Christian vision, Don Bosco offered his message to everyone and also involved women in his work, enhancing the formative potential, acknowledged in Maria Mazzarello, of the art of living the Preventive System in a female key.
What defines the Preventive System is the fundamental option for the Kingdom. The values that inspire pedagogical movements, that is, the affirmation of life, human dignity, honor, virtue, science and power, must be fully harmonized to give shape to the human ideal. Don Bosco always believed that education would free man. This is why we affirm that the Preventive System is our Salesian "way" of being, it is a spirituality.
A school must be conceived as an educational space to learn to learn, to live together, to believe, to be and to do. All this requires thinking of the school as a privileged space for the communication of ideas and ideals, of reflection and action, of solidarity and respect for differences.
Fr Reinaldo Barbosa de Oliveira, SDB
Source: www.boletimsalesiano.org.br
