education To Give Reasons Is Always to Demonstrate Lorenzo Ornaghi, Rector of Sacred Heart Catholic University, measures himself against the second factor of The Risk of Education: “It’s a matter of showing in the most concrete way possible that there is no affective discontinuity or ethical inconsistency between speaking of tradition and working in the present.” edited by Alessandro Gamba Fr Giussani affirms that the educative communication of tradition and of the past has to be fascinating in the present–in other words, full of reasons that make one grasp its value and relevance… The key word is surely “reasons.” To give reasons is always to demonstrate, according to the category of evidence. In the educative context, it’s a matter of showing in the most concrete way possible that there is no affective discontinuity or ethical inconsistency between speaking of tradition and working in the present. This connection–which is always a connection of the experiential kind–constitutes, amongst other things, most sincere openness to the future and true entrance into tomorrow. For the present is not a parenthesis on its own. Fr Giussani’s rich formulation allows us to save the present as continuous openness to perennial novelty, making it impossible to fall into the dangerous conception of claiming that the future is wholly written in the past (which is exactly that declaration of sterility to which Western culture seems too often inclined). So it follows that the right question to bring out in young people is not “What should I do?” and not even “What should I be?” but, rather, “What am I?” Exactly. The question “What am I?” is the progressive acknowledgment of my being. So I understand that duty is not something imposed on me from outside (perhaps violently), and therefore something inevitably limiting, but rather a consequence of my being to be hoped for. The ways in which I go about realizing my “can-be” or my “must-be” then emerge in some way from myself, through the signs of reality. If one is correctly educated in the method of the answer, then the question “What am I?” is much more simple than the first two, which, contrary to appearances, are much more difficult and insidious, since they get one tangled up in a whole series of hypotheses which lack the criterion of a unitary order. How would you describe the roots of a false education? I would use the words Fr Giussani uses in The Risk of Education: it is “the prevalence of ideology over observation.” Ideology–we learn this from all the ideologies present in history and politics– always presents itself as a “truth” communicated and proposed (or imposed) for belief, independently of whether or not it corresponds to reality. Observation is an effective antidote to every false or pseudo-realist content. I am not talking of a spontaneous kind of observation, but observation educated in the intelligence of being. In your personal experience as a teacher, where is the boundary between proposing and imposing on a student? It lies in cultivating freedom: if I recognize that I am free and I recognize this irreducible freedom in the person before me, the boundary between imposing and proposing is immediately clear to me. Otherwise, the boundary becomes maliciously labile or, precisely, ideological. Fr Giussani points out two factors needed for an authentic cultural renaissance to be possible: interest in everything and fundamental certainty. How do you react to this as Rector? I share this assumption. And the aspect I would like to stress is that it’s not a matter of the individual’s interest in everything and fundamental certainty. It’s when this twofold experience becomes collective, widespread or–the more the better–communitarian, that we have an authentic cultural renaissance. To constantly reaffirm that the university, as life and as institution, is founded on a strong communitarian belonging, explicit and accepted, is the task to which every rector must feel himself called. Is educating a vocation? If we want to keep the full sense of vocation (“being called” and, in turn, “calling”), we have to answer a convinced yes. It is not important to discuss whether it is a “higher” vocation than others. But it is certainly not an adventure for money-grubbers.