Luigi Giussani’s harsh critique of modern secular education: it produces adults who are not equipped to deal with conflicting value systems and evaluate and apply ultimate values to their own lives. This leaves them either (1) uncommitted to any particular paradigm, (2) rebelling against existing value systems, or (3) resigning themselves to the status quo. This results from not having been properly prepared to make wise decisions in this realm of life. The public schools, in particular, teach about ideas, but do not challenge students to learn how to evaluate them. Predating the explosion of online and virtual learning by a few decades (written in 1995), Giussani points out that a student listening to a lecture that is like a videotape, i.e. without back and forth interaction with the teacher, will not learn how to evaluate claims and counterclaims or even learn anything beyond rote facts.
Giussani proposes a different paradigm, so that students (adolescents) will mature into fully functioning adults. Education is an introduction to reality, and we do not affirm reality unless we affirm its meaning. This meaning is ultimately based on absolutes, but the adolescent must decides which ones: is tradition to be embraced without question, or accepted after a period of questioning and the basis of tradition understood, or is tradition rejected based on the student’s freedom? The teacher’s role is to guide the student through the process. The adolescent will best learn to use tools with which to process these options - competing sets of value systems - in concert with a mentor who advises and encourages. Otherwise skepticism and cynicism are likely to be the student’s destination. The student needs personal experience as the ultimate verification methodology leading to true conviction about ultimate values.
The crisis of Christian education is that Christianity is not ultimately about tradition, theology, church activities, or creeds; Jesus is a Person, the Son of God. He interjects Himself into peoples’ lives with an encounter. When the adolescent or young adult encounters Christ, how will he or she respond? The problem of faith is that the things that are taught lack verifiability, until we meet Christ. We can read the Church fathers, study apologetics, engage in good works, but that does not verify the truth of Christianity. That is the crisis! It is the personal interaction with the Savior, the Truth incarnate, that verifies Christianity. The educator’s goal is therefore to prepare the student to dialog openly and honestly with the other, that is, with Christ.
The final chapter is frankly hard to understand, as the author attempts to deal with epistemology. The role of experience, tradition, community, and authority are to be woven together into the fabric of faith. How this is to happen is the educator’s challenge.
