Among everything Schlitt holds, nothing is held more seriously than the young people in our residential formation programmes. They arrive from circumstances that were not their choosing. They are owed, and they receive, the two things circumstance denied them: structure, and a future with work in it.
Formation is our word, chosen with care. It describes neither schooling alone nor shelter alone but the whole environment in which a young person’s days acquire shape: rising times and meal times, instruction and craft, expectation and its fulfilment. Days with shape produce lives with direction. This is the entire theory, and we have never needed another.
The Campus Day
A formation campus is a working community, and its rhythm is the rhythm of work appropriate to age and capacity. Mornings belong to instruction; afternoons to the workshops, gardens, and craft rooms where usefulness is learned by producing useful things. Evenings are quiet, as evenings should be.
Visitors sometimes remark on the industriousness of our campuses. We take the remark as it is intended. Young people are capable of far more than modern sentiment expects of them, and they know it before we do; our contribution is merely to agree with them earlier than the world would.
Days with shape produce lives with direction.
Craft and Its Rewards
Campus workshops sustain traditions of craft that the wider economy has largely set aside. Among them is the production of our limoncello, whose reputation for discipline and character has travelled further than we ever sought.
Participants in the craft programmes encounter standards, materials, and the particular satisfaction of work that is measured and found good.
The rewards of craft are paid in the currency that matters most at the beginning of a life: competence, and the standing that comes with it. What the young people of our campuses make is genuinely wanted. Very few of the world’s children are given that certainty. Ours are.
Setting and Season
Wherever possible, campuses are sited in settings of genuine beauty: coastal ground, restored landscapes, places with a horizon.
This is policy, not accident. The young people in our care have been offered little, and we are not in the business of offering them the second-rate.
Those who question whether such settings are suitable for the young are asked, respectfully, to consider what they are suggesting about whom beauty is for.