The campaign on education

Appeal

In connection with the publication of the new Italian edition of the book, The Risk of Education, by Fr. Giussani, a November 17th announcement in Italy promulgated an appeal to mark the beginning of a cultural campaign on the theme of education and its risk. We are all invited to re-examine the question of education, a true international emergency that concerns everyone, not just schools or teachers. Without education, in fact, there is no future. The campaign on education will continue with meetings and debates in cities, schools, universities, workplaces, and the mass media.

If There Were
an Education of the People,
Everyone Would Live
Better
(Fr. Giussani)

A great emergency has swept through Italy and all countries. It is not a political nor even an economic emergency–to which everyone, from left to right, looks for a possible “recovery” for their country–but something on which politics and the economy both depend. It is called “education.” It concerns every one of us, of all ages, because it is through education that the person is built up, and, therefore, society, too.
It is not just a problem of instruction or of training for a job.
Something is happening that has never happened before. What is in crisis is the capacity of a generation of adults to educate their own children.
For years, from the new pulpits–schools and universities, newspapers and television–it has been preached that freedom is the absence of ties and of history, that one can grow up without belonging to anything or anybody by simply following one’s personal taste or pleasure.
It has become normal to think that everything is equal, that in the end nothing is of value except money, power, and social status. People live as if truth did not exist, as if the desire for happiness of which man’s heart is made is destined to remain unanswered.
Reality itself has been denied, as has the hope of a positive meaning to life, and there is the risk of raising a whole generation of young people who feel like orphans, without fathers or teachers, forced to walk as if on quicksand, blocked before life, bored and at times violent, and in any case led along only by fashions and power.
But their boredom is the child of our own boredom; their uncertainties the child of a culture that has systematically demolished the conditions and the environments of education, like the family, the school, and the Church.
It is possible and necessary to educate, that is to say, to introduce people to reality and to its meaning, reaping the fruits of the patrimony that comes from our cultural tradition, and it is everyone’s responsibility.
We need teachers, and there are teachers, who can hand on this tradition to young people’s freedom, who can accompany them as they discover the truth of it with all its reasons, who can teach them to have esteem for themselves and things—because education is a risk, and it is always a relationship between two freedoms.
This is the road summarized in a crucial book, born of the intelligence and educative experience of Fr. Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education. Everyone is talking of human capital and of education. We think it is fundamental to face this question by starting off from a concrete, practical, possible, and living response.
It is not only a matter of schools or for “those concerned.” We are making an appeal to everyone, to all who have the good of the people at heart.
Our future depends on it.