Vocation

Vocation...this seems like a never ending theme here at Calvin College. Our professors are obsessed with it. It seems to Calvin that perhaps this is the end all and be all purpose of a college. This is a problem in my view. I hold with C.S. Lewis that college is about a human pursuing knowledge because he has interest in it. The important thing is that a person has to find on his own the what he enjoys the most because, while an institution can possibly introduce the person to a thing which he loves, the institution can only show him some of his chosen field of study and should not teach the person as one would do on the job training. When you are at college you are there to learn for the sake of learning and to learn how to be a better man not do a prolonged four or more year training for a job.

Now this is not to say that a college does not manage to prepare us for a job in four or more years, but to say that this preparation is not the primary purpose. Thus, I do not think we can say that making people find a Vocation is a plausible goal of a college. Rather the purpose of a college in this respect should be to provide a place in which one can learn more about a field one already enjoys and provide a place that a person who has many can varied interests can come and learn more about each and use that information to decide for himself what his vocation should be. The professors, while they should help the students, should not be primarily focused on the students careers but rather helping the students learn more about a subject that they enjoy which as a by-product will be beneficial to their careers. I am sure that by now you have noticed two things, One that this is very similar to "Our English Syllabus" and, two, that both points of thought give the same information, but the difference between the two schools of thought is the way in which the student and the professor engage the subject matter. On one hand, the student sits in class and gets lectured at and on the side of learning alongside one another, both student and professor engage the subject matter because of their enjoyment there of not under the coercion of the Board of Trustees or because a Core requirement says they should.