Don Bosco The Innovator

“In 1884 Don Bosco bought a suitable pavilion 55 metres long by 20 wide, for the grand National Exhibition of Turin (Italy). The workshop heads and boys worked under the gaze of visitors who could follow the whole process of producing a book: making the paper, setting up the press, printing, binding and packaging the goods for sale.”2 - This does make Don Bosco a definitive innovator. Doesn’t it?

By 1856, Don Bosco’s institution for street kids & orphans had grown to 150 boys. He added a printing press for publication of pamphlets. While providing shelter to hundreds of homeless street kids, Don Bosco also trained them for numerous professions. Their teacher would very often would be

Don Bosco himself. The skills and trades he learned as a child helped him to teach the children at his Oratory.

One of his most innovative gestures was getting a pavilion for the National Exhibition of Turin where his boys demonstarted the production of a book from scratch. He used great ingenuity in this instance to display the technical skills of his students which in turn, he hoped, would provide them with jobs that would keep them off the streets and save them from abject poverty and hunger.

Don Bosco had begun his first printing press in 1861, which published books for youth and in 1877 published the first issue of the Salesian Bulletin.

“As a child, he had learned to work in the fields, to be a shoemaker, a baker, a tailor, a writer. Don Bosco very much appreciated print and the press and therefore produced numerous writings, also to make up for the lack of books suitable for young people and the most humble people.”3

Another great anecdote from the Life of Don Bosco:

“One day in 1853 he took a corner of Mama Margaret's kitchen and converted it into a cobbler shop; the tiny hallway became a carpenter shop. The teachers? Don Bosco himself and two hired men. Now there was really no quiet place at the Oratory with all the banging of hammers, but in the midst of all the rumpus was born the Don Bosco Trade School. Not that Don Bosco ever called it that, but that is what the movement developed into. Today the congregation of Don Bosco operates professional training centres and college-preparatory schools throughout the world; both in highly developed countries and in many underdeveloped countries.” - It all started in a shed, with Don Bosco as the teacher!

2 http://archivio.sdb.org/ 3 Infoans.org