Trasmitting for growth ” “

“Transmitting. Sharing values, encouraging freedom”: that’s the theme of this year’s “Semaines sociales” (Social Weeks), an important annual event in the life of the Catholic Church in France, due to be held this year in Paris, at the headquarters of the CNIT (National Centre of Industries and Technologies, at the heart of the quarter known as La Défense), from 25 to 27 November. The family, school, world of work, the Church, media and the life of the Catholic associations are the main issues on the agenda of the six forums; fields in which, says the President of the Semaines sociales, MICHEL CAMDESSUS, “the ‘crisis of transmission'” that is investing society today is reflected in its various aspects: a crisis that concerns “the transmission of values and knowledge, of the meaning of authority and of faith, in particular in the relation between generations of persons of different cultures. A series of lectures, round tables and testimonies will punctuate the three-day event, which will end on the afternoon of Sunday 27 November with a eucharistic celebration presided over by the archbishop of Paris, André Vingt-Trois. A meeting promoted by the Taizé Community is also planned for the evening of Friday 25th ; it will be dedicated to the young professionals who work in La Défense. For further information: www.ssf-fr.org or: 2005@ssf-fr.org TRUST. “Trasmitting, enabling the young to grow up… Is not that the wish of every educator?” asks ISABELLE YON, professor of philosophy, mother of two children and former president of the JEC (Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne, Christian Student Youth), in a reflection on the theme of this year’s “Semaines sociales”. Tracing her own experience in Christian associations, characterized by the meeting with adults who “had trust in you and listened to you without expecting anything in return, but hoping much of you”, Isabelle Yon said that “it is this devotion to the young that “enables them to grow, because it permits each person to develop his/her own peculiarities”. What is the challenge posed by the process that leads to independence? At the level of schooling, “it is not persuading the pupil to adopt my own points of view because they seem to me better than his or hers, nor, at the family level, is it preventing my children from living in order to stop them from suffering”. “Rather – says Isabelle Yon – it means trying to preserve the freedom of each new pupil who bears in himself something extraordinary that I had not foreseen”. “Is not this the mystery that astonishes us and fills us with wonder at the birth of a child? Who is this newborn child? Time is needed to discover it”. THE “JOURNEY”. How should we accompany the process that leads to independence? “Here the question of transmission comes into play, and it seems to me that it once again forces us to renounce any temptation of domination, because it involves the need to share our knowledge and our savoir-faire in a dynamic, vital, and not in the least mechanical relation between educator and child”. According to Isabelle Yon, the main function of the school is, in fact, that of “transmitting the past as key to the present, so as to enable each new pupil to win his/her own space in the world and renew it with his/her own personal contribution. Without this type of transmission the child is maintained in a relation of dependence, and precluded from transcending what he already knows”. So the task is “not to hope that pupils accept the culture linked to the past of which the teacher is the ambassador, but proposing a kind of ‘journey’, based on their own pace of development and with all the risks it involves”. DIALOGUE. Since educator and pupils don’t speak the same language, “I am convinced that no transmission of culture is possible – warns Yon – if the teacher does not have a positive and benevolent attitude to the child and to everything of which that child is the bearer, often unconsciously. Contempt, on the contrary, undermines the foundations of trust that is vital for the child’s healthy development. Whether the pupil accepts or not the challenge of self-transcendence, whether he wishes or not to learn, in other words to transform himself, that is entirely up to him. It seems to me that the teacher’s mission consists essentially in meeting the pupil’s culture, and dialoguing with it”. It is a dialogue that “necessarily leads the teacher to relativize, at least in part, educational culture and to place it in discussion”. It must also seriously commit the teacher – concludes Yon – to “get to know better the pupil’s land of origin and adapt the syllabus accordingly, bearing in mind the plurality of cultures that characterises our society”.