The Nobility of Teaching

"I wanted simply to say what I think are the fundamental factors of the whole educative process. First, the value of tradition, which is the first factor targeted and censured where a power dominates in society, in the family, in civil society, and paradoxically, in religious society. At times, it can happen that ecclesiastical society, if it is lived as will for power, censures its own history. Second, the figure of the educator, which is the place where tradition becomes conscious and becomes a proposal, but it is a proposal that must offer companionship in its impact, and therefore in the comparison, and in the comparison show the reasons for the proposal itself. But this, the third factor, that is to say, the proof, the verification, is not mathematical; it is not a matter of logic; it stops short, as I said, on the threshold of the person's freedom. Here lies the drama of the risk of education. But whatever be the immediate outcome of your own loving passion (because as the Pope says, there is no demonstration of love for mankind like the educative commitment), the living proposal, in other words, the "I" of the educator, must be untiring, an "I"that is not halted by any circumstances of space or of time, nor therefore of age, nor by any exterior situation, not any kid of response." 

These remarks constitute the closing paragraph of a conference given by Fr. Luigi Giussani on The Risk of Education in 1985 in Milan Italy, (so the Pope mentioned would be John Paul II.) I think it is a remarkable summation of a conference about an incomparable book. It is a final paragraph that concisely packs in the density and depth of Giussani's wisdom on education with an image of the teacher as sacrificial victim. Educators (teacher, preacher, mother, father, Christian, etc.) are called on day after day to give all they have in them, and give it freely, in the face of rejection, indifference, opposition, and even persecution.  It makes me realize that if our teaching is not a "loving passion" that makes us pour ourselves out in self gift, we are doing our students, ourselves, and the Truth we hope to communicate, a tremendous injustice.