PREVENTIVE PEDAGOGY. - It is that aspect of educational method which consists in making the pupil aware of his duties and of the prescriptions imposed upon him, and then in watching over 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 place him in the impossibility of failing.
As is evident from the definition, preventive p. is founded on the one hand on the good sense and piety of the pupil and on the other on the loving kindness of the educator, excluding every violent punishment and seeking to avoid even light punishments themselves. With this one is far from recognizing, after the manner of Rousseau, the original goodness of man, or from excluding a priori, after the manner of Tolstoy, every punishment; it means only that one must be convinced that children very often fail through an insufficient criterion of evaluation, through thoughtlessness, through the absence of a guide and of an educator. The latter must therefore not tire of repeating his observations, always showing the greatest trust in the capacity for recovery and in the will of the young to improve. As for punishments, one must also recognize that human nature sometimes needs to be constrained by severity (there are also in the Gospel threats of punishments for sinners), but punishment must not be resorted to without reason and justice and after having exhausted all other means.
The educator must therefore 1) show a great affability, which does not border on weakness and on that foolish yieldingness, wrongly compassionate, which compromises with evil and, in order to lighten the effort and the sacrifice, abolishes duty and thus produces feeble characters, incapable of struggling and of winning. Education, on the contrary, must unite gentleness and austerity, must not conceal any duty however grave and arduous, but must help by example to bear its weight and to make it light, so that the pupil learns to see love in those things which please him least, such as discipline, study, self-mortification, and learns to do them with love; 2) show and make understood that he loves the pupil intensely, but seriously, so that the latter does not feel drawn toward him by a fatuous and superficial sense of sympathy, but by the ardent charity which he sees in him, of seeking souls in order to lead them to God; 3) show himself ready to face every disturbance and every effort for the good of the pupil; 4) not favor the more intelligent and better characters, from whom the best satisfactions are obtained without effort, but make the object of his solicitude the more negligent and less yielding; 5) maintain a vigilance which is attentive, yes, but which does not smack of policing and of burden; 6) use confidence and familiarity, taking an interest in the games, in the preferences of the pupil, perhaps participating in them and helping them to succeed; 7) study the right moment for making the observations suited to the correction of defects or to the understanding of the fact of having failed; 8) show, in turn, understanding for youthful restlessness in the face of exercises, even more so when they are too prolonged, or arid, or heavy; 9) never forget the supernatural and that the life of the Sacraments is the foundation of the whole educational edifice; for which it must be said that only the Christian, in himself, can practice preventive p. successfully.
These and other arts, which can be found for the various particular cases and characters, will win the soul of the pupil, who will always love and remember his educator; who will no longer be angered by corrections, will not be discouraged by the faults committed, will not take offense at a punishment threatened or perhaps inflicted, because in all this he will see a warning and a friendly gesture of one who knows how to understand and sympathize with him, and will easily come to recognize the necessity of a punishment and even to desire it and even to ask for it. And it will become even easier for him to avoid relapses into the same faults and to acquire a self-mastery, sure and effective for the further battles of life (v. also PUNIZIONE E PREMIO).
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