School / Why It’s Worth Beginning Again / VITERBO 1977

A spur to life
At a national gathering of the teachers of Communion and Liberation in Viterbo, Italy, in August 1977, Fr. Giussani gave a talk on renewing the educational movement in our schools. Here is an excerpt:

The true starting point needs to be renewed every day. This is our genius, our strength. The beginning is a Presence that affirms itself. The beginning is a spur, but not to the “brain”… The true beginning is a spur to life. Whatever is not a spur to life is a waste of time and energy, and prevents us from feeling true fulfillment. … (The complete text is found in The Risk of Education, Crossroad Publishing, 2001.) If education means communicating a way of living reality, this way proposes a hypothesis that explains reality. The hypothesis is not, therefore, a discourse but it is an adult who lives–though, precisely by living he also engages in a discourse. The word hypothesis is meant to stress that the presence, the communication of the adult, is a risk, because it involves the freedom of the young. And freedom is the ability to measure oneself against destiny, through things; to adhere to being through contingencies. The educational action is a risk because it is abandoned to a fragile freedom; here one understands the limit of one’s own person and the unfathomable mystery of the other.
These perceptions foster a humility that does not in the least weary enthusiasm, which does not in the least weaken passion. It makes this enthusiasm and this passion the true proposal and not an attempt to win the other’s favor.