2012-2013 Education promoting the future

Year 1597: Saint Joseph Calasanz opened the first free public school in Europe in the Trastevere area in Rome to take care of and offer a future to those children who nobody had bothered to educate until then.

Year 2000: The United Nations approved the Millennium Development Goals. Goal 2, Achieve universal primary education, has the following target: Ensure that by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.

The aim of Calasanz’s major project more than 400 years ago –no children out of school–, which led him to found the Pious Schools and start a work which later spread to many other parts of the world, is still one of the greatest challenges facing mankind nowadays.