PREVENTIVE PEDAGOGY. — This is that aspect of educational method which consists in making the pupil acquainted with his duties and with the prescriptions imposed upon him, and then supervising him with the loving eye of a father, serving as his guide in every circumstance, giving him advice and correcting him in such a way as to render it impossible for him to do wrong.
As is evident from the definition, preventive pedagogy is based, on the one hand, on the pupil’s good sense and piety and, on the other, on the educator’s loving kindness, excluding every violent punishment and seeking to avoid even light punishments. This is very far from recognizing, like Rousseau, the original goodness of man, or from excluding a priori, like Tolstoy, every punishment; it means only that one must be convinced that children often do wrong through insufficient judgment, thoughtlessness, and the absence of a guide and educator. The latter must therefore never tire of repeating his observations, always showing the greatest confidence in the young people’s capacity for recovery and their desire to improve. As for punishments, it must also be acknowledged that human nature sometimes needs to be constrained by severity (the Gospel, too, contains threats of punishment for sinners), but punishment should not be imposed without reason and justice, and not until all other means have been exhausted.
The educator must therefore: 1) show great affability, without allowing it to degenerate into weakness or into that foolish, misguided indulgence which compromises with evil and, in order to lessen effort and sacrifice, suppresses duty, thereby producing feeble characters, incapable of struggling and overcoming. Education, on the contrary, must unite gentleness and austerity, conceal no duty, however grave and arduous, but help by example to bear its weight and make it lighter, so that the pupil learns to see love in those things he likes least, such as discipline, study, and self-mortification, and learns to perform them with love; 2) show and make it understood that he loves the pupil deeply but seriously, so that the latter does not feel drawn to him by a vain and superficial sense of sympathy, but by the ardent charity which he sees in him: the desire to seek souls in order to lead them to God; 3) show himself ready to face every inconvenience and every hardship for the pupil’s good; 4) not show preference for the more intelligent and better-behaved characters, from whom the greatest satisfactions are obtained without effort, but make the most negligent and least amenable the object of his solicitude; 5) maintain an attentive vigilance, certainly, but one that does not resemble police surveillance or become burdensome; 6) cultivate trust and familiarity, taking an interest in the pupil’s games and preferences, perhaps even participating in them and helping them to succeed; 7) discern the right moment for making the observations appropriate to correcting defects or helping the pupil understand that he has done wrong; 8) in turn, show understanding for youthful restlessness in the face of exercises, especially when they are too prolonged, arid, or burdensome; 9) never forget the supernatural, and that the sacramental life is the foundation of the entire educational edifice; hence it must be said that only the Christian, in himself, can successfully practice preventive pedagogy.
These and other skills, which can be found for the various particular circumstances and characters, will win the pupil’s heart; he will always love and remember his educator. He will no longer become angry at corrections, will not be disheartened by the faults he has committed, and will not stubbornly resist a threatened or perhaps inflicted punishment, because in all this he will see a warning and a friendly gesture from one who knows how to understand and show compassion toward him. He will easily come to recognize the necessity of punishment, and even to desire it and indeed ask for II. It will also become easier for him to avoid relapses into the same faults and to gain a firm and effective mastery of himself for the further battles of life (v. PUNIZIONE E PREMIO).