1. The Meaning of Vocation.
—At the present time the conflict of philosophic theories focuses in
discussion of the proper place and function of vocational factors in education.
The bald statement that significant differences in fundamental philosophical
conceptions find their chief issue in connection with this point may
arouse incredulity: there seems to be too great a gap between the remote
and general terms in which philosophic ideas are formulated and the
practical and concrete details of vocational education. But a mental
review of the intellectual presuppositions underlying the oppositions in
education of labor and leisure, theory and practice, body and mind,
mental states and the world, will show that they culminate in the
antithesis of vocational and cultural education. Traditionally, liberal
culture has been linked to the notions of leisure, purely contemplative
knowledge and a spiritual activity not involving the active use of
bodily organs. Culture has also tended, latterly, to be associated with
a purely private refinement, a cultivation of certain states and
attitudes of consciousness, separate from either social direction or
service. It has been an escape from the former, and a solace for the
necessity of the latter.
So deeply entangled are these philosophic dualisms with the whole
subject of vocational education, that it is necessary to define the
meaning of vocation with some fullness in order to avoid the impression
that an education which centers about it is narrowly practical, if not
merely pecuniary. A vocation means nothing but such a direction of life
activities as renders them perceptibly significant to a person, because
of the consequences they accomplish, and also useful to his associates.
The opposite of a career is neither leisure nor culture, but
aimlessness, capriciousness, the absence of cumulative achievement in
experience, on the personal side, and idle display, parasitic dependence
upon the others, on the social side. Occupation is a concrete term for
continuity. It includes the development of artistic capacity of any
kind, of special scientific ability, of effective citizenship, as well
as professional and business occupations, to say nothing of mechanical
labor or engagement in gainful pursuits.
We must avoid not only limitation of conception of vocation to the
occupations where immediately tangible commodities are produced, but
also the notion that vocations are distributed in an exclusive way, one
and only one to each person. Such restricted specialism is impossible;
nothing could be more absurd than to try to educate individuals with an
eye to only one line of activity. In the first place, each individual
has of necessity a variety of callings, in each of which he should be
intelligently effective; and in the second place any one occupation
loses its meaning and becomes a routine keeping busy at something in the
degree in which it is isolated from other interests. (i) No one is
just an artist and nothing else, and in so far as one approximates that
condition, he is so much the less developed human being; he is a kind of
monstrosity. He must, at some period of his life, be a member of a
family; he must have friends and companions; he must either support
himself or be supported by others, and thus he has a business career.
He is a member of some organized political unit, and so on. We
naturally name his vocation from that one of the callings which
distinguishes him, rather than from those which he has in common with
all others. But we should not allow ourselves to be so subject to words
as to ignore and virtually deny his other callings when it comes to a
consideration of the vocational phases of education.
(ii) As a man's vocation as artist is but the emphatically specialized
phase of his diverse and variegated vocational activities, so his
efficiency in it, in the humane sense of efficiency, is determined by
its association with other callings. A person must have experience, he
must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical
accomplishment. He cannot find the subject matter of his artistic
activity within his art; this must be an expression of what he suffers
and enjoys in other relationships—a thing which depends in turn
upon the alertness and sympathy of his interests. What is true of an
artist is true of any other special calling. There is
doubtless—in general accord with the principle of habit—a
tendency for every distinctive vocation to become too dominant, too
exclusive and absorbing in its specialized aspect. This means emphasis
upon skill or technical method at the expense of meaning. Hence it is
not the business of education to foster this tendency, but rather to
safeguard against it, so that the scientific inquirer shall not be
merely the scientist, the teacher merely the pedagogue, the clergyman
merely one who wears the cloth, and so on.
