Education

The Risk:
An Education for the People
The Italian re-publication of The Risk of Education by Fr. Giussani was presented on October 9th in Rome

by Alessandro Banfi

It’s a humid, not cold, October evening in Rome at the Augustinianum Institute, close to the columned walks of Saint Peter’s. Education is the topic, with the presentation of the most recent Italian edition of The Risk of Education, re-published in its original form by Rizzoli. The “news” arrives at the end, when Giancarlo Cesana, responding to Professor Ernesto Galli della Loggia (authoritative commentator of the most important Italian daily newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera), explains for everyone the true secret that made an exceptional educator of Luigi Giussani, the book’s author, who passed away eight months ago. Fr. Giussani loved the young people he encountered; he truly loved them, not generically or like a do-gooder, but precisely, acutely, and dramatically. “He respected the form with which the Christian Mystery manifested itself; he respected man,” recounts Cesana. This is “the genius of the Movement” of CL that Giussani drew forth in fifty years, adds Cesana, opening up the last part of the evening’s debate to the news announced by the Director of the International Center, Jesus Carrascosa, of a “cultural campaign on education” in Italy and the world.

Giussani’s was not just a feeling or a psychological aptitude, but a precise historical judgment that implied a vision of the world and of history. This is understood very well by Julián Carrón, President of the Fraternity, who comments on the Church and the world, “The Church cannot take humanity for granted. Her possibility to start anew will depend on her capacity for education, on the fascination she will be able to draw forth.” What of the calls to good behavior, moral values, and ethics? “These are all things that do not truly mobilize the ‘I.’ A Christianity reduced to values, reduced to ethics, does not strike today’s man.” Today’s Church must also place this bet, play for the expectations of the heart of man. The education of young people is also and above all a problem of the world. Here, Carrón repeats the judgment expressed by Fr. Giussani after the terrible terrorist attack of Nassiriya: “If there were an education of the people, we would all be better off.” Carrón explains, “To become men, nature is not enough; the pure and simple evolution of the living being is not sufficient. The encounter with the other that we call education is necessary.”
Take away all our rights, but not the right to educate.