Educating Desire: Learning to Recognize What Truly Matters

What do you want to be when you grow up? It is one of the questions that most often accompanies growing up. We ask children almost playfully, and as the years go by, the question gradually becomes more concrete: which school to choose, which university path to pursue, which profession to imagine for the future. Yet behind these questions lies another one, perhaps less immediate but more profound: what kind of person do I want to become? 

It is not simply about a profession or a goal to achieve. It concerns the person we would like to be, what we choose to devote our energy and time to, the relationships we want to build, and the meaning we give to our choices. In a context in which we are constantly exposed to possibilities, models, and expectations, recognizing our own desires can be far from simple. What we want can easily become intertwined with what others expect of us, with what is considered desirable, with the need for recognition, and with the images of success we encounter every day. 

For this reason, desire itself can become an educational question. It is not about teaching young people what to desire, but about accompanying them as they learn to understand what truly moves them.

Between What We Desire and What We Learn to Desire

Our society offers possibilities that previous generations could hardly have imagined. At the same time, it constantly multiplies images of what we should be. Success, performance, visibility, recognition, experiences to pursue, goals to achieve: especially in digital environments, comparing our lives with those of others has become part of everyday life. The risk is that desire itself may begin to take the form of a silent competition. 

Do I really want this, or have I learned to consider it important? Does this goal correspond to who I am, or to a need to prove something? Am I choosing this path because it belongs to me, or because it seems to be what others expect of me? These are difficult questions, and it is not always possible to answer them immediately. This is precisely where education can offer something valuable: a space in which there is no need to have an immediate answer. 

Educating desire also means allowing young people to explore possibilities, encounter different people and realities, discover abilities they did not know they had, and even change their minds. It means helping them understand that not all desires carry the same weight and that what seems attractive in the immediate moment does not always coincide with what can give meaning to a life. It does not mean, therefore, telling a young person which path to choose. It means offering them the tools and time they need for that choice to become truly their own.

Desire in Ignatian Pedagogy

Desire holds a particular place in the Ignatian experience. The Spiritual Exercises repeatedly invite the person to ask what they deeply desire, because what we feel inwardly drawn towards can become one of the places in which we learn to understand ourselves and our choices more fully. But listening to desire does not simply mean following whatever we want. 

Rather, the Ignatian tradition invites us to reflect on what is happening within us: to recognize what generates openness, freedom, generosity, and availability to others, but also what closes us in on ourselves, makes us dependent on recognition, or leads us to choose only what appears easier or more gratifying. It is here that desire and discernment meet. 

Before asking “what should I do?”, we need to learn to listen to the question “what am I really seeking?”. Discernment does not begin with a list of ready-made answers, but with the ability to recognize what moves us and to understand the direction in which it is leading us. In this sense, school can be much more than a place where we prepare to do something. It can become a space in which we begin to understand what is worth putting who we are and what we know at the service of. 

Learning itself then takes on a different meaning. Knowledge and skills do not serve only to build a professional future; they can help each student discover interests, questions, talents, and responsibilities that gradually contribute to defining their place in the world. 

Accompanying Without Choosing for Others

Educating desire requires particular attention from adults. Parents, teachers, and educators naturally want what is best for the young people they accompany. Precisely for this reason, it can sometimes be easy, without even realizing it, to impose their own expectations on young people’s desires: pointing towards the path that seems safest, placing greater value on certain abilities, or imagining in advance what might make them happy or fulfilled. 

Ignatian pedagogy instead proposes a form of accompaniment that takes personal freedom seriously. The educator does not decide what the answer should be, but helps the young person ask better questions. What are you passionate about? Where do you feel that what you can do might become meaningful for someone else too? Which experiences have helped you grow? What makes you freer? Which possibility allows you to make the most of who you are? 

These are not questions that necessarily lead to immediate answers. They can accompany a journey, change over time, and become clearer through experience. For this reason, educational accompaniment also requires trust: trust that growing up does not mean having a perfectly defined plan as soon as possible, but gradually learning to recognize a direction. 

This perspective belongs deeply to the educational approach of the schools of Fondazione Gesuiti Educazione: placing integral formation at the centre means not considering students solely in terms of the results they can achieve, but accompanying them in discovering their uniqueness, their possibilities, and the responsibility that comes with them. 

At the end of an educational journey, we can certainly ask what knowledge a student has acquired and what skills they have developed. But we can add other questions: have they learned to know themselves a little better? Have they learned to question their desires? Are they discovering what truly matters to them? Can they imagine their future not simply as a space to occupy, but as something to which they can contribute? 

Perhaps educating desire means precisely this: not handing young people a future that has already been written, but helping them become free enough to recognize what is truly worth choosing.