Pedagogy of the Future

Abbé Pierre (1912-2007), was a French Catholic Priest who founded the Emmaus Movement in 1949 to help poor and homeless people and refugees. For almost twenty consecutive years he was voted the most popular person in France. He has come to India at the invitation of Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan to deal with the issues of refugees. Fr. Duvallet was for twenty years a collaborator of Abbé Pierre in the work of re-education of delinquent youth. He makes a significant appeal to the Salesians: “You have works, colleges and oratories for young people, but your real treasure is one and only: the pedagogy of Don Bosco. In a world in which youngsters are betrayed, drained, ground down and exploited, the Lord has entrusted to you a pedagogy in which the paramount aspect is respect for the boy, for his greatness and frailty, for his dignity as a son of God.

“Preserve it, renew it, rejuvenate it, enrich it with all modern discoveries; adapt it to all the developments of the twentieth century and their ramifications that Don Bosco could not be aware of. But I beg you to keep it safe! Change everything, let your houses go if necessary, but keep this treasure and build up in thousands of hearts this way of loving and saving the souls of boys which you have inherited from Don Bosco.”

A French Pedagogue, Guy Avanzini, says that “the pedagogy of the 21st Century will be either Salesian or not at all.”

Fr. Duvallet, an activist and Avanzini, a theoretician, both present the preventive system, a system developed yesterday as the system for tomorrow, as the pedagogy of the future. What is this system?