VOCATION

 

When I was a boy, I remember adults asking me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  Like most boys of my acquaintance and age I would answer, “I want to be a big-league baseball player.”  Later I would say, “I want to be (in order of my evolving aspirations) “a game warden or forest ranger,” or, if my golf game was ‘on’ I would say, “a professional golfer,” or, if my game was ‘off,’ and I knew I needed a job that would get me more than $1.25 an hour, an “orthopedic surgeon.” But when I  considered my high school grades being just a little above average knew that being a surgeon would be out-of-the-question, and seeing I might get drafted into the service of my country, I considered the best alternative to that seeming inevitability as applying to be an officer in the Marine Corps;  but again seeing more clearly that that would not be a good idea, I would think (but not say), “I would just like to grow up—the sooner the better—and marry my childhood sweetheart and build a cabin in the woods and be blissfully happy with her and my dog and my books and my fishing rod.” 

At the time of my mid- adolescence I learned of the concepts of ‘career’ and of ‘vocation,’ though I thought a career was mostly just a label describing a job that lasted a lifetime, and ‘vocation’ was just a difficult job, hopefully a fun job, but certainly a ‘manly’ job such as carpenter, or lumberjack or car mechanic such as my dad had.  But I had not considered a real vocation a ‘calling’ that had implications beyond what I saw on the surface. Yet there was some inchoate thought regarding my future that ran through the back-burner of my mind from about age 13 on, and that was I wanted to teach something, and I wanted to be a disciple of Jesus; I wanted to live a useful life and, to use a term learned in my Faith, “meet the measure of my creation.” There was something I needed to do.

 At the end of my first semester of community college when I turned eighteen things began to gel.  With encouragement from the girlfriend I really didn’t want to lose (she later became my wife—a gift sent to me from God) I really bore down and went about focusing on achieving my goals and discovering God’s goals for me: spiritual and educational growth, and settling on more than a just a job to make a living, or even a career, but entering upon a useful vocation where I could make a ‘life’ for me and those close to me, and, perhaps, contribute to the lives of others. Marriage, I felt, was critical to that process.  Later that year I entered my junior year in college and in the same month married my childhood sweetheart, and for the first time really took my education and my future seriously.  I assiduously studied physical education and the social sciences, and on my off-campus time really began to focus on my spiritual growth and my marriage.  It was a season of maturing.  

By the time I was twenty-one I had graduated from college, started public school-teaching and, after several months of serious investigation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with my young wife joined that church, convinced that it had answers to many of my deepest questions, and opened possibilities that my previous religious experience had not adequately answered or illuminated. This decision was a point of conversion. And through it I felt that I had stepped onto the path of ‘vocation.’

An important thing to understand about finding one’s ‘vocation’ is that if it is truly his vocation it leads to joy. My Church teaches, and it rings true, that, “Man is, that he might have joy.”  One’s vocation requires that it involve sacrifice, which seems a contradiction, but it is not. To enter a vocation is to leave some things behind. Sacrifice is to give up something good, for something better.  Marriage, as a prime example, is a vocation; it is to give up a lesser good—a degree of freedom and irresponsibility, for something much better—a companionship and affection, a helpmeet both to give to and to receive from, an object of focus other than self, a union in charity, a potential for family—a bringing into the world and a forming of young souls, of becoming a creator or a partner in creation of assuming and passing on eternally meaningful responsibilities and possibilities.

A vocation, I learned, is to enter a good work—a significant work—and to give yourself to it. In a sense, one who does so can identify with Christ: “For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth” (John 18:36). To engage in a vocation is done in order to submit ourselves to what our own conscience or inspiration tells us to be the truth and the will of God to do in behalf of others. It is a response to a felt necessity, or even a “summoned life.”

How do you find your vocation?

“When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, you are only in the service of your God” (Book of Mormon, Mosiah 2:17).  You are also in the service of yourself, obliquely, if you are not focusing on yourself.

“The vocation of each one of us is fixed just as much by the need others have for us as by our own need for other men and for God” (Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island, p. 141).

Well there you have it.  My advice would be to find your vocation, your purpose in life, as soon as you can—whether at age 20, or 40, or 60, or 80. As you age you may discover a new vocation for you or a first real vocation as you close down your career or the series of jobs that provided for your living.  It is a way of defining and refining your character and organizing your life, what you have left of it, in a meaningful way.  And, you will find,  it will in some way help others.  

In short, to find your vocation look around and see who needs your help and who you seem naturally attracted to and who or what God seems to be pointing you to after you have prayed to Him for guidance.  David Brooks said it well, “A vocation is not found by looking within and finding your passion.  It is found by looking without and asking what life is asking of us” (David Brooks, The Road to Character, 2015).  When you find it, commit to serve.  Lose yourself in it, and as you do, you will ‘find’ yourself as the scriptures say, but you will also find something greater.  What, you ask?  Just do it and you will find out.  

As it said on the welcoming marquee of my university: ENTER TO LEARN; GO FORTH TO SERVE. Good advice. 

PUBLIC SCHOOLING (pre-2021) and a WARNING ABOUT CURRENT TRENDS

Let me start by stating my philosophy of public education. 

My philosophy of public education, in brief, is that this critical social need (education) has vested in the schools a duty to teach the fundamentals and provide a foundation of what a young person needs to succeed in life.  Schools, moreover, need to assure that the students know that parents and teachers have high expectations of them and that they can achieve worthy goals.

 Schools, we have decreed, need to teach our children, their students, how to read and write and speak clearly; to be given encouragement in critical thinking and communication and to learn how to respect one-another and the adults in their life.  Students need to learn to calculate and analyze and respond in appropriate ways to the challenges he or she will face in a complex world.  There is also a body of knowledge that needs to be transmitted: of history and government, of geography, of science, of healthy living practices, of literature and of the arts. 

 Young people need character education (moral and civic) taught by teachers who themselves have high character and the freedom to teach it.  Students need a safe and healthy environment to learn and observe these things and teachers who will teach truth and model it.  Recognizing that there is dysfunction in many homes and other social institutions, such as government and the entertainment industry, and that there is evil in the world, there needs to be a counterpoint in the example of adults who provide an education for the young.  Teachers and adult leaders need to be examples of wholesome living for our young—people who provide opportunity and reinforcement and encouragement for students to express themselves in appropriate ways and then expect students to internalize the rules of civil behavior and emulate their role models who exemplify these qualities. 

In light of what is happening to our children in today’s schools (when they are in  session) I want to raise a warning voice.  In fact, I want to shout a warning voice that the values articulated above are not what is happening in far too many schools in every stratum of society. It is not just the big-city schools that are failing; it is endemic across the board.  Many parents, who have recognized this and who can afford it, are pulling their children out of public schools and are placing them in private schools or are home-schooling them.  With COVID-19 restrictions and responses by teachers’ union-driven school districts the whole concept of public schooling needs re-evaluation if public schools are to survive and provide the service that is expected of them. 

 In 1983, the year I was starting to wrap up my studies leading to a doctorate in education, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released its appropriately-titled and timely landmark report A Nation at Risk.  Now, nearly forty years later the nation is not just ‘at risk,’ (as are the students) but public education and even college education are in free-fall failure—a failure of focus on principles and performance and consequently of achievement of ‘the American Dream’ for the current generation and for generations to come. 

The fault lies in the educational establishment of the last 55 years-- since the late sixties--and in the philosophical direction it has bought into or has been brought into it by self-styled ‘elites’ who have rejected the foundational principles and practices of the pre-progressive era.  Just as our Constitution was established by the American people, of the people, and for the people, so were our early structures in education.  But they have been forsaken by these ‘elites’ who have focused on money and power and position and philosophies foreign to the guiding and undergirding principles of America’s heritage.  

 Teachers’ Unions (to which I never belonged) initially and particularly were to blame.  They focused not on the children or the substance and quality of what was being taught, but rather as organizations of political action—liberal action--and we are seeing it imposed on our culture like never before.  Supporting this reality I would bring to the attention of the reader the shocking revelation of a dedicated Brooklyn, New York, schoolteacher who was the victim of current practices by teachers’ unions and the pressure tactics of the ‘liberal educational’ establishment.  (See Paul Rossi, “I Refuse to Stand by While My Students Are Indoctrinated,” Meridian Magazine, April 30, 2021; see also, Christopher F. Rufo, “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It,” Imprimis, March 2021).  

 The sustained attack in the late sixties and seventies on traditional American values by the teachers’ unions and teacher-training colleges started the devastating decline we are experiencing so greatly now.  Again, it was recognized in the eighties by the A Nation at Risk report but it was not heeded and so we are reaping the whirlwind.  According to the report, the authors warned: “Secondary school curricula have been homogenized, diluted [dumbed down] and diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose.  In effect, we have a cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main course.” 

 This sustained Marxist-based, anti-American, and divisiveness-promoting attack is now being experienced not only in education, but in all of our public institutions.  It is a serious threat to our entire culture.  

 Former U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. William J. Bennett, under the Reagan administration, noted that “English, history, math, and science gave way to a curriculum lacking substance, coherence, or consistent structure; it was replaced by faddish, trivial, and intellectually shallow courses.  Schools became laboratories, and students guinea pigs.  If there was a bad idea in the land, often the first place it was tried was in the school.  If we had problems of order in the classroom, the solution was an open classroom and no order at all. If our students weren’t learning history, the solution was not to teach them history but . . .often a sloppy amalgam of half-baked, ‘politically correct’ sociological theories” (William J. Bennett, The Devaluing of America: The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children). 

 Increasingly, concerned parents became alienated or disenfranchised from their schools and yielded to the cult of ‘expertise’ and began to be fearful of speaking up on educational, social, and political issues. When serious teachers are asked the single most important improvement that could be made in education, they invariably say greater involvement and cooperation on the part of parents—which means that parents’ concerns would be welcomed and seriously addressed.  

And parents would say that the most important improvement would be that better teachers would count most. They are both right.  I would say that better teachers and better parenting as a partnership would produce the best results for our children.

We must not forget that the finest education that was had was when traditional American values were respected and taught to our children in the late 19^th and first sixty years of the 20^th Century and when mothers, especially, were in the home and augmented the teaching in the school by nurturance in the home. 

 I would further say that in today’s climate, investing total confidence in public (government) schools and relying on them exclusively to teach our children, we have come face-to-face with what some religions have called ‘relying on the arm of flesh’ and is a dangerous folly.  In simply throwing money at the problems or relying on pop-psychology or an ideologically-driven, elitist self-proclaimed ‘expert’ to guide curriculum construction, will be to our national detriment. Twenty-five years ago, former Secretary Bennett said, “The fundamental problem with American education today is not lack of money; we do not underspend, we underproduce.  A review of some 150 studies shows no correlation between spending and educational achievement.”  Not only is the money ‘solution’ still true, but now we are faced with an insidious attack on the fundamental principles upon which an assault on our young is occurring and our very culture is at serious risk.

 I am convinced that both the school and the home would do a much better job of educating our children if we wouldn’t be reluctant to declare that some things—some lives, books, ideas, and values—are better than others.  “Seek ye out of the best books” and learn from history the things that matter most.  If the schools don’t promote these things, the home must.  It can teach the values of home, family, and country and religion.  In the long run, the parent is the child’s most important teacher.  Schools have failed and will continue to fail to a greater or lesser degree under current politically-driven ‘leadership’. 

 But parents must not fail.  And children will not fail if they get the support they really need from the home and the school.  Remember, there were no public- school systems when this American republic was founded. 

 Posted by Old Schooler / Scholar (formerly Omnium-gatherum-millermade at 9:56 PM 

A HIGHER PATRIOTISM

February is the birth month of four presidents of the United States of America. Two perennial days of patriotic remembrance, in February, had formerly been established, specifically, for two of our finest leaders, President George Washington and President Abraham Lincoln. Fifty years ago, in 1971, those two days were consolidated into one ‘Presidents’ Day’ which now has morphed into just a three-day national weekend and sort of a mid-winter secular thanksgiving day with a slightly patriotic residual.    

President Ronald Reagan’s birthday also falls in February and can be rightly honored. February is also the birth month of perhaps our least-known and least effective president, William Henry Harrison, whose presidency ended on April 4, 1841, only 31 days after it had begun (he died of pneumonia). The record shows that he did not have or make his time in office productive or do anything noteworthy that would put him into the esteemed company of the other three presidents who the more patriotic among us honor this month.

As mentioned, usually and rightfully Americans have begun the new year for many decades in separate holidays which acknowledged and celebrated  our two finest presidents.  We now, in the interest of ‘political correctness’ (by liberal definition) and merchandising convenience, have combined these two birthdays into one ‘Presidents’ Day.’ We also have included on the calendar this month the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., not a president, but a good man who was highly influential in promoting in a peaceful way the legitimate goal of human rights for all Americans. We have to balance these things, you know.

Beyond these few exceptional individuals we also express, usually in greater measure, our patriotic sentiments each year on Independence Day (and in likewise manner combined with it the establishment and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, into what most Americans simply call ‘the 4^th of July’, none of which, incidentally, occurred precisely on 4 July). By further extension we tie in Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day to our remembrances of the events and groups of brave citizens who we honor with our patriotic [dictionary definition of ‘patriot’: “one who loves his country”] songs, gatherings, picnics, and related celebrations.

All of these acknowledgements respectfully tie in with the patriot’s gratitude for the freedoms we enjoy as Americans—many of which were paid for at great expense, in sacrifice, in blood, and even in death.

And so we see there is a traditional dimension of patriotism which is part of the American character tied up in red, white, and blue, in coming together of families and communities, in speeches and in stirring music. And these are good things.

But patriotism also has its higher and lower dimensions of expression.

As an example of the latter, there are those who drive around their communities in their pickup trucks with an American Flag and/or a ‘Trump for President’ flag flapping in the back, even after a new president has been sworn in, thinking, I guess, that they are doing something patriotic. Perhaps. Even more distorted, in my mind, are those who think that joining a white ‘supremist’ group,or participating and training in a para-military ‘army’ make them elite patriots. I differ with that thinking and suggest there are higher and more appropriate considerations for patriotic expression.

I take the patriotic hymn “America the Beautiful” as an example and as expressive of higher dimensions of patriotism we would do well to consider. Carefully read or listen to the lyrics.  I will treat a few of them in this essay.

The lyric phrase in that song that says, “the patriot dream that sees beyond the years,” was commented on by one of America’s finest patriots of the 20^th Century. Neal A. Maxwell, said of that song: “It reminds us of the special perspective that patriotism possesses. True patriotism takes the long view of this nation’s needs.” I have gained much from Mr. Maxwell’s astute observations of patriotism.

With few exceptions the political perspective of our leaders of recent times has been much foreshortened; it has been on attacking others who have not gone along with their political views or ambitions; it has been forgetting the lessons of our history as a nation and our involvement in well-intentioned, but in some cases misdirected wars to protect us from what was perceived as immanent danger or the erosions of our freedom under law. It has been stagnating partisanship instead of bipartisan efforts at E Pluribus Unum.

It has been on throwing out our traditional (conservative) moral standards and safeguards in favor of promoting directly or tacitly the agenda of the iconoclast, the lawbreakers, and the deviant minorities among us at the expense of the decent and the innocent and yet unborn—the most innocent being the aborted human beings who were deprived of all human rights—even the right of their own lives. Not only do ‘black lives matter,’ a true patriot believes ‘all lives matter.’ It has, as well, contributed greatly to the angst and depression and existentialism of those who are the younger generation who will have to pay the price of our prodigality.

Therefore, the farsightedness of our founding fathers, the bravery and heroism of those in uniform (true patriots, I believe will ‘Back the Blue’), the contributions of those who wrote the laws which were based upon Constitutional and religious standards and restraints have been diminished at the expense of those who have championed ‘toleration’ and ‘rights’(?), as they stridently demand, to do what used to be called “their own thing” regardless of how egregious that behavior might be, or collect unearned ‘government benefits’ at the expense of other people who are paying their bills. Giving all people a decent chance, or even a second chance is, of course, the right thing to do, but it should not give the able-bodied or able-minded a free ride throughout life. A self-labeled patriot, like all Americans, need to do all they can to further their own righteous agenda without treading on the rights of others which gives patriotism a bad name.

A higher patriotism is more, though, than paying taxes or simply abiding by the laws of the land, more than saluting the flag or voting or even saying with conviction the pledge of allegiance “to…the United States of America” rather than some foreign country. Of course it includes these things. Patriotism requires an educated public, and growing from it a public participation in productive endeavors that unite us rather than separate us from one another.

I also bring your attention to those words in “America the Beautiful” that urges us to “confirm thy soul in self-control.”  How self-controlled are our self-proclaimed gun-toting “patriots,” and more our non-patriots, who pull down statues, who taunt the police and loot and burn cites, who rewrite our history in their own agnostic image or who try to skew our political system to the historically failed or tyrannical systems of many countries in Europe or Asia or the Middle East?  Those who have a lack of self-control contribute to our nation’s devastating drug problem, growing crime, and in a large measure to our problem of homelessness by demanding entitlements to reclaim a life of bad decisions. A lack of self-control historically has brought upon those who do not have it severe external controls, or will to our society anarchy if it gets the upper hand.

The place to develop self-control is in healthy families, but families are failing because far too many parents have failed—failed to keep their marriage commitments “through thick and thin, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health.” Parents who have failed to nurture their children by being with them and teaching them and loving them, failed to understand that child-care, or schools, or television, or cell-phones, or even grandparents are no substitute for the sacrifice parents must make to show children they love them and expect good things of them. School teachers, entertainment ‘personalities,’ even police are no substitute for failure in the home.    

Other lyrics of that wonderfully patriotic hymn “America the Beautiful” include the phrase that America should be “crowned with brotherhood,” but we have increasing separatism in class structure, in race relations, in economic parity, in educational attainment, in those who feel left out of the American Dream. Fortunately we still have churches who welcome people of every circumstance into their fold to rekindle a hope of a hopeful future for all of God’s children, not just those who have been born into privilege or assumed an attitude of entitlement. If the parishioners implore God to “mend our every flaw” as the song implores, we must believe in the “mender.” We must build on a spiritual foundation and we must work; and we must do as Abraham Lincoln said in a tragic and different context but which express the same principles:

“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here [Gettysburg, 1864] have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

A patriot does that. A true patriot must have a disciplined conscience and be obedient to that conscience and believe that virtue must reside in himself, not just in the leaders.

A higher patriotism requires that those who consider themselves to have responsibility to such a conscience understand, as stated by one of our founding fathers, our second president, John Adams: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people; it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” The patriot must demonstrate that “moral and religious” in their interactions with all people. More legislation or executive orders or even further amendment to our divinely inspired Constitution will not “mend our every flaw,” which are many, unless we begin the task of mending ourselves, and our families, and our communities, and then trust in God to make up the difference as we continue to make our best efforts.

The strands of our moral fiber are more-and-more being stressed and frayed by those—and the number is increasing—who have no patriotic sentiments or moral foundation for their lives, and our nation will not long endure without it. We cannot endure as a nation, as a people, with God’s blessing upon us with hostility to or indifference to or ignorance of the inspired principles upon which this nation, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” was founded.

 

I end on the sober note expressed by John Stuart Mill, not a founding father, or a conventionally religious man, but a wise man who, I think, God raised up to influence a back-sliding nation as America would be in the early years of the 21^st Century:

“A people may prefer free government but if from indolence or carelessness or cowardice or want of public spirit they are unequal to the exertion necessary for the preserving it; if they will not fight for it if it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if they by momentary discouragement or by temporary panic or by a fit of enthusiasm by an individual they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet of even a great man or trust him with powers which will enable him to subvert their institutions; in all of these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty, and though it may be that for their own good they have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it.”

President George Washington in his Farewell Address likewise counseled us thusly:

        “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would that man would claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, the firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician along with even the pious man ought to respect and cherish them.”

Let us resolve, therefore, and this year, to develop a higher patriotism, for we will need it in the perilous and portentous days that will surely confront us in the days ahead.

God bless America, and help us mend our every flaw.