“Education is a matter of the heart”.

When a family decides to enroll their son or daughter in a course, there may be various reasons.

Very often it is a kind of Tetris game that aims at filling the schedule of children and teenagers. It is a need that must be understood: unfortunately, the complexity of life pushes towards more fragmented forms of parenting; work absorbs and seems to leave no room for anything else. Being a parent is not at all simple.

But beyond “logistical” reasons, each parent also chooses on the premises of a perspective of well-being and values. There is no parent who does not want something good for their children.

Learning a sport; improving the capability of building bonds and relationships with others; absorbing core values.

In a word: education.

The role of a teacher, whatever the activity practiced, is therefore to be primarily an ally of the educational system in which a child, a teenager is immersed.

In order to trigger this alliance, a teacher must constantly grow in three dimensions.

The first is certainly methodological. A child’s motor and cognitive skills are constantly evolving and require adapting training so that growth is organic and functional. Copying the typical training method of a group of adults and applying it as it is to minors is obviously a limited and misleading perspective.

The second goes in the direction of equipping oneself with communication tools that activate empathy and recognize the expressive methods of a generation that is different from that of the teacher. Each generation has its own peculiarities and sensitivities. Recognizing them in order to establish an educational relationship is essential.

The third is value-based. A teacher cannot limit himself/herself to repeating like a faithful parrot the values contained in the discipline he/she teaches but, in dialogue, he/she can realize how much it is necessary to support, reiterate, highlight and orient those basic values that are the foundation of a serene life and living in harmony in society.

Children, even if they are small, like and need to bring out their inner world, to elaborate their experiences and to bring out their value and spiritual side. They need, because when put in the conditions to express themselves they require it, to have someone who explains to them the reasons behaind a value.

They are closer to the world of values ​​than an adult is: this innate code needs tools so that it becomes progressively aware.

Therefore, through accurate technical preparation sized to their needs; together with the creation of an empathetic and trusting environment, it is possible – necessary – to go and train the most important part of any athlete.

A part that, for many reasons, often remains uncultivated but when it is cared for it makes the desert in which we sometimes find ourselves flourish again.

“Education is a matter of the heart: all the work starts from here and, if the heart is not there, the work is difficult and the outcome is uncertain”.

Don Bosco wrote this many years ago and, looking at his results, he was right.

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