“Let’s not have our love of school stolen!”

Papa Francesco
La Chiesa per la scuola, 10 maggio 2014

We believe that Ignatius of Loyola still has much to say, that his insights of five centuries ago still have meaning, relevance and a future in a complex school system, governed by civil laws, which follows common teaching programs and is engaged in many pedagogical experiments to meet the new educational challenges. In a context like ours, therefore, the training of professional figures is central: both because of the tradition that distinguishes us, and because educators are not just any professionals.

In our colleges, Jesuits are now a minority: almost all of the teaching and non-teaching staff is made up of laity and laity, from different backgrounds. It is therefore essential to involve them directly, throughout their professional journey, making them partners in a shared mission. Those who wonder what is so special about Jesuit schools, or what makes them loved by students and families, should be able to understand it first and foremost from teachers and the educational model: “In a Jesuit school – as Fr. Hans Peter Kolvenbach, former general of the Society of Jesus – the main responsibility for moral and intellectual formation rests, in the last resort, not with the programs or school or extracurricular activities, but with the teacher, under God’s guidance.”The formation prepares lay people to assume roles of increasing authority and responsibility, lived in a leadership of service, in which human and academic excellence are combined.

For this reason, starting in 2004, it was decided to create a special tool, shared with all the colleges of Italy: the Cefaegi (Centro di Formazione Attività Educativa dei Gesuiti d’Italia) was born, with the task of authoritatively promoting for educators a regular, progressive and methodologically structured training program. A reference team – composed of both Jesuits and laymen and women – works in Cefaegi to train educators in the colleges that are members of the Foundation and in other institutions or schools that want to refer to the Jesuit educational tradition. The purpose is to keep alive and promote the values of Ignatian spirituality by applying them to school education. In this sense, it is fundamental to be open to the dimension of service and responsibility, in order to be able to form men for others, sensitive and open to the promotion of justice.

The Jesuits’ commitment to the school would be meaningless if we did not think of the school as an apostolic instrument, capable of educating by taking care of the whole person of the student. The education of young people,” said Father Kolvenbach, “is perhaps the clearest form of participation in the creative work of God,” but in order to do this, it is necessary to educate by teaching: that is, it is necessary that teaching go beyond the mere transmission of content and promote the integral formation of the person. We try to do this with all our strength, involving not only students but also teachers and families, important components of our apostolic project. It is clear, then, how important it is for us to create a collective, group effort that provides a shared outcome, vision and methodology.

We seek to form teachers who are able to work alongside families in a fundamental educational alliance and we prepare them for a double task: “that of orienting the lives of students in the search for truth and life values and that of academic orienting” (Father Luiz Fernando Klein SJ, Guía Práctica del Paradigma Pedagógico Ignaciano, 1997). We teach them to do it as Ignatius of Loyola would do it (who, by the way, was precisely a layman, and not a consecrated person, when he wrote the Spiritual Exercises), asking – as a main requirement – that they be willing to put themselves on the line and open to change. The formation we are talking about is based specifically on a modality commonly referred to as an action of reflexivity on one’s own way of understanding and acting. It distinguishes itself from and complements the necessary and essential task of updating that characterizes the teaching function in a world subject to rapid change.

We do this primarily in residential seminars at the national level, for both newly appointed and experienced teachers, at two different levels: the first level is what is referred to as propedeutic – to which all newly hired teachers are sent – while the second is characterized as continuing in-depth systematic training on the methodology that constitutes the so-called Ignatian pedagogical teaching “paradigm” (PPI). The training proposals – always residential and of several days – for teachers and collaborators also in the leadership in the “colleges” of the Jesuits are also placed at levels of gradual and increasing deepening, aiming at the objective of making people taste and experience progressively the very human and spiritual experience of Ignatius, to which the inspiration and methodology refer. It can therefore take place, at a first step, the colloquium to reach in the end the personally guided experience of the Spiritual Exercises, from whose announcements derive many of the principles that aim to accompany the learning and growth of the year in the school journey.

Visit the site of CEFAEGI: www.cefaegi.it