The risk of education : discovering our ultimate destiny

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom. Title Page Copyright Contents Foreword Preface Introductory Thoughts I A Matter of Method II The Personal Dimension and the Community Dimension III Times and Contexts in Implementing a Method Chapter One: The Dynamic and Elements of the Educational Event I Preliminary Observations II Loyalty to “Tradition”: The Source of the Capacity for “Certainty” III Authority: The Existentiality of a Proposal IV Personal Verification of the Educational Hypothesis V Risk: A Necessity for Freedom VI Conclusion Chapter Two: Crisis and Dialogue I The Critical Step II Dialogical Openness III Conclusion Chapter Three: The Structure of Experience Luigi Giussani: A Brief Biography Notes "This is an English translation of an Italian work first published in 1995. Based in Milan, Italy, Giussani heads the Communion and Liberation movement and is a council for the Congregation for the Clergy and the Pontifical Council for the Laity. He discusses education in terms of fundamental truths, in particular, the element of faith. It presents the argument that without the fundamental factors of tradition, the young person is merely a fragile leaf separated from its branch."-- Provided by publisher "This is an English translation of an Italian work first published in 1995. Based in Milan, Italy, Giussani heads the Communion and Liberation movement and is a council for the Congregation for the Clergy and the Pontifical Council for the Laity. He discusses education in terms of fundamental truths, in particular, the element of faith. It presents the argument that without the fundamental factors of tradition, the young person is merely a fragile leaf separated from its branch."--Résumé de l'éditeur How an effective education gives young people the fundamental support of tradition and historical perspective, nurturing their ability to understand and discern. How an effective education gives young people the fundamental support of tradition and historical perspective, nurturing their ability to understand and discern.