Il metodo educativo di don Luigi Giussani: una risposta valida all’urgenza formativa dei nostri giorni

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic particularly affected younger generations, exacerbating the educational crisis. Recognizing that educating young people remains a priority in our post-pandemic society, this article is a contribution to today's educational challenge. It presents and analyzes the new approach to education that was proposed by Luigi Giussani (1922-2005), a Milan priest and founder of the Communion and Liberation movement. His educational method can be summed up in four basic words: tradition, authority, verification and risk. In the first part of the article, we want to show how tradition represents everything in which a pupil is born, so it is a starting point, or rather a working hypothesis as defined by Giussani. This tradition must be lived in the present, guided by authority (second part of the article), which helps the young person to experience that everything he has received meets the deepest needs of his heart. The educator is an authority when he communicates himself, that is, shows that the tradition he transmits to the young person has been realized above all in him.
 Finally, the consequence of this is education for criticism and verification (part three). For Giussani only in this way becomes the educational relationship a source of freedom and the possibility of true knowledge and authentic critical awareness.
 Giussani proposes a pastoral care and education that is strongly focused on freedom, which manifests itself precisely in the capacity for verification and criticism. The pupil, living in freedom, constantly striving towards his destiny, is called to constantly verify whether this working hypothesis, that is, the tradition that has been handed down to him, is true, whether it really responds to the deep needs of the ultimate truth of his heart. And it is in freedom, that is, in the awareness of the paradox of dependence, that verification can be fully accomplished. This is the educational risk, which we'll cover in Part Four.