Introduction: Education in Don Bosco’s Way is a student-centered approach to education. Student-centered education generates expressive youngsters who cultivate happiness wherever they go. The focus of the entire educational endeavour – the syllabus, the staff, the location, the architecture, the building, the playground, the facilities – is to be planned with a view to the holistic development of the young person for whom and in whose name it is created.
The pupil are to be treated with kindness and respect; it was the educational responsibility to place youngsters in a happy, vigorous, enquiring educational environment, a context where all were treated as equals, encouraged to speak up and to speak out, to one another and to their teachers. Student is to be invited to become the active subject and enthusiastic learner. The focus of Don Bosco’s way is therefore, student-centered for self-actualization and social participation. Through it, the student matures into a dynamic agent of social, political and cultural progress.
The Don Bosco Way: Don Bosco’s Way of Education combines the preventive System that acknowledges the tendency to evil existing in all humans, and the expressive system that complements and completes the preventive method of education. While the preventive method forestalls the harm in view of the complete growth of the young person, the expressive method provides a wide variety of opportunities for maturation. This combination protects from all influences that would morally harm them, rather than being affected by them and fosters experiential learning, talentnurturing, skills-development, and training for livelihoods – all these possibilities are made available in order to create the positive reinforcement needed for a healthy self-esteem and for growth in self-actualization and citizenship. The entire pedagogical experience is based on parental safeguarding with kindness, availability in a family atmosphere that boosts experiential learning in discipline and peer collaboration. It enables one to cooperate with one’s peers.
The Philosophy: The Philosophy of the DB Way acknowledges human freedom and the power to choose between good and evil while admitting at the same time, human frailty and complements, in perceiving human person positively capable of self-realization given the conditions favorable to maturation. The task of the educator is to let the good succeed over and against the young person’s evil tendencies andprovide those conditions so that growth in the young person is facilitated.
The Attitude: The attitude of the educator is one of accompaniment, assistance, encouragement and support. The educator creates safe and healthy environment providing opportunities for positive self-actualization through a motivating presence.
The Skills: The educators develop skills of loving concern, encouragement and motivation beginning from the things that interest their students to the things they consider important for them to learn. The educators are kind
guides who are discreet and farsighted in the care of the students. They accompany them in the hope of fostering good and healthy habits, helping them to mature in freedom, self-esteem and responsibility.
The Learning: The learning takes place through guidance and fostering selfdetermination that leads the educators stand back and encourage the
progress of the student in his/her journey towards maturity.
The Perception: A perception of the educator shifts from seeing students as fragile, vulnerable with rights to be defended to perceive them as friends and fellow seekers who are to be prepared for self-reliance as future contributors to the society. Similarly the student’s perception shifts from looking at their educators as accompanying guides and guardians to a friend, motivator, hero and a fellow pilgrim on the road of life.
The Emphasis: The emphasis starts with protection and moves on to the growth and expression.
Don Bosco believed education that takes place through loving persuasion. He is eager that young people “benefit rather than suffer when they are the objects of disciplinary action”. DB applied Preventive method in a manner that was intrinsically linked to his exuberant and expressive personality. These expressive characteristics form part of his educative methodology. They transcend the preventive aspects of protection from harm so as to include positive motivations to enable young people become the best they can be. Preventing young people from bad influences was essentially linked
to training them for self-expression through creative activity.
Through expressive education he strengthened the fundamental capacity of the youngsters to believe in themselves by feeling valued, cared for and loved. A healthy self-esteem was the foundation upon which all else could be built. His expressive education was directed towards self-discovery, the forming of character and the strengthening of personal resiliency against the great challenges that life had in store for his young friends.
Through the encouragement of personal and community expression, DB gave young people opportunities for maturing in body, mind, and spirit, for leadership, for talent-development, for becoming honest citizens capable of contributing positively to the betterment of society. This harmonious blend of the preventive and expressive methods distinguishes DB’s educational
approach from other preventive approaches of his time.
DB’s presence: DB’s presence among his students as father, guide, motivator, hero, friend and fellow pilgrim won their admiration and their love. Many were even willing to lay down their lives for him.
His presence, practical insight, charm and charisma may be translated into three essential components of holistic growth. They are rapport, reason and religion or to put it in another way, they are the attitudes of loving kindness, reasonableness and religious integrity.
Education to meet the Needs, Impart Values and Develop Attitudes and Skills: Don Bosco, being a positive realist, focused on Need-Based Holistic Education.
The Needs: Education must address the three fundamen-tal yearnings of the heart, the mind and the spirit. The student’s emotional need for a trusting relationship is met with the kindness of the educator’s rapport, the rational need for intellectual enquiry encounters the reasonable dialogue of the teacher and the spiritual need for personal and social happiness is inspired by the religious guidance of the educator. Holistic education is holistic even in the educational relationship it fosters between the two interacting parties. So Education is a combined journey towards maturity. Education is the art of growing with the young day by day.
Value: It means “a principle, standard or quality” which we consider worth pursuing and striving after for the benefit of the whole educational enterprise. Seen in this light, rapport, reason and religion are values that are integral to DB’s Way. They are ends in themselves as well as means to achieve the overarching goal of holistic education.
Attitude: It is a state of mind or feeling or disposition that motivates us to realize the values that contribute to holistic growth. The deeper conviction of the importance of the values we hold betters our disposition to live by them.
This disposition orientates us towards living out our values through our words and actions. The value of Reason, Rapport and Religion develops attitudes of reasonableness, loving kindness, moral and religious propriety in my relationship and dealings with my students.
Skill: It is the ability, coming from one’s knowledge, practice, aptitude, etc to do something well. It means competence and expertise.
The attitude of being reasonable in my relationship with young people prompts me to improve my skill of reasonableness in the daily contacts I make with my students. Conversely, a conscious, daily practicing of skills will improve my attitudes to students, which will reinforce the values I live by, which in turn will affect my general behaviour and my relationships. Thus, Values, Attitudes and Skills are essentially linked together in the one process of responding to the young person’s basic needs.