The Salesians are a modern congregation founded to educate poor and working boys in the industrial city, and their distinctive contribution is a method of education built on kindness rather than punishment.
Don Bosco and the young
The Society of Saint Francis de Sales was founded by John Bosco at Turin in 1859 to educate and train the poor and working-class boys drawn into the industrialising cities of northern Italy, where they were exposed to exploitation and neglect. Bosco developed what he called the preventive system, an approach to education that relied on reason, religion and affection, keeping the young occupied and cared for so that wrongdoing was forestalled rather than punished, and this method, warm and practical, is the charism the order carries. He named the society for the gentle bishop Francis de Sales.
A worldwide educational body
The Salesians grew rapidly into one of the largest religious institutes in the church, running schools, technical and vocational training centres, oratories and youth works across the world, with a parallel congregation of women, the Salesian Sisters, founded with Mary Mazzarello, and a wide lay family. The order concentration on the education and formation of the young, especially the poor and those needing a trade, has made it one of the principal Catholic agencies of schooling and social advancement, and Bosco preventive system remains the reference point of its work more than a century after his death.