EDUCATIONAL VOCATIONS, OR VOCATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE STATE  
Every vocation on its ethical side is educational. The reason for accentuating the educational aspect of the vocations connected with the state is that this educational significance is generally overlooked. The vocations referred to are those of the lawyer, the judge, the statesman, the teacher in the narrower sense of the word (the teacher in schools and universities).
 
The Vocation of the Lawyer
 
Vocation, as I use the term, invariably means related to the spiritual end of life. A profession or occupation becomes a vocation when he who follows it seeks to respond to the call of the latent spiritual possibilities in his fellowmen. If this be not the common definition of calling or vocation, yet I think it will bear scrutiny. It is the vocation of the lawyer to be the teacher of justice to his clients,—I mean of justice in so far as it is already embodied in law,—and at the same time to promote a desire for and a preliminary understanding of the justice which is not yet embodied in law.
 
The lawyer is commonly regarded as the learned alter ego of his client. The lawyer is the client as he would290 be if he were versed in the law, and skilled to employ it in his interest. The client is supposed to be an egotist, intent solely on securing his advantage to the fullest extent possible under the existing system of social regulations. The lawyer is his expert substitute. The judge appears on the scene as the impartial representative of the law.
 
From the vocational point of view the lawyer is an assistant to the judge, the agent not so much of his client as of justice. He is as much interested in the just issue of the suit as is his legal opponent. His educational function is to teach his client to take the same point of view. Another point, no less important, is the following: Law is a system of general rules, at best a rude social mechanics. And even as such it is constantly deflected from its ostensible purpose by selfishness and prejudice. The discriminations against women, the conspiracy laws against combinations of laborers, the laws enacted in the interests of landed aristocracies, are ample evidence in point. In every country the law as it stands is still largely infected with unfair discriminations, and it is the special duty of those who follow the legal vocation to open the eyes of their clients and of the public to these defects and to suggest remedies.
 
Every vocation has its special vice, that is, a kind of behavior the very opposite of that prescribed by the particular ethical function with which it is charged. The vice of the lawyer is blind conservatism (unless he is at the same time progressive and conservative he fails to fulfil his ethical function).
 
The judge, too, is a teacher, especially in criminal291 cases. The voice of the judge, when he pronounces sentence on a criminal, should reverberate throughout the whole of society, awakening all men to the fact that society as such shares the guilt.
 
The Vocation of the Statesman
 
What I have to say on this subject will find its proper setting in the next chapter. In general, it is the vocation of the statesman to teach the citizens a sublime conception of the state. He is neither to be the obedient tool of the mass—the docile “public servant” in that sense—nor yet to impose his arbitrary will upon the people, consulting only his own genius. The one type is seen in the average American politician, who is or affects to be a mere instrument executing the public will; the other type is exemplified by the supermen statesmen of ancient and modern times. The ethically-minded statesman is to evoke the spiritual conception of the State in the minds of his constituents, and in the process of doing so to become more essentially a citizen himself.
 
The Vocation of the Educator
 
It was unavoidable to discuss the vocations and their aims before considering the school, college and university; for these institutions are orientated towards the vocations, are preparatory to the latter, and the true aim of school and university cannot possibly be defined unless the vocational outlook be first distinctly spread before our eyes.
 
In dealing with the vocation of the teacher, I shall292 necessarily be led to define the purpose of the social institution in which he labors and I shall for the sake of brevity use the word school to designate the social organs of education, which cover the period of childhood, adolescence and the beginning of manhood and womanhood.
 
The school is like the hundred-gated Thebes. It leads out into a hundred vocational avenues. But note the following: its aim is far greater than merely to prepare the student for that future vocation to which he is best suited. It should no less supply the incentive for creating new vocations, and for changing what are at present still occupations into vocations. The school searches out the individuality of its pupils. It undertakes to differentiate and to personalize individualities. But when it has done its part, it sends the pupils into a world where little account is taken of the finer differences of aptitude, where occupations predominate and vocations are few, and where most things, ethically speaking, are still in the rough. The school cannot indeed transform society by merely raising its indignant voice and asking society to pay heed to the finer things which it has fostered, and which often are subsequently crushed. But it can at least contribute to the vocational evolution of society by reiterating its unsatisfied demands.
 
Taking the three-fold reverence for my guide, I lay it down in the first place that the school is an organ of tradition. True conservatism has its place in the school. In it are preserved the knowledges and the skills of the past. The heir of today comes to his own by appropriating the products of past thinking and past labor, and the school superintends the process of appro293priation and assimilation. At the same time it sifts in tradition what is clean from what is unclean, what is true from what is false, what is usable from what is dead. Reverence is shown in this very sifting process. To revere the past is to make the past live again; but only what is vital can go on living.
 
The teaching should be reverential in spirit. The business spirit, the drive towards mere efficiency, cannot in the long run satisfy. Efficiency as commonly understood has in view the utilities of the moment. It merely exploits the past for the sake of present interests, and as a rule is unmindful of the future. Industrial efficiency, in particular, reverses the right ethical relation between work and personality; instead of work being so contrived as to liberate personality, it is mechanized so as to sacrifice personality.
 
The teacher should be reverent towards the great masters of his own craft, his own art. No one is reverenced by others who does not himself habitually revere someone. The teachers should be acquainted at first hand with the master educators, such as Plato, Comenius, Pestalozzi and the others.
 
I pass on to speak of the second type of reverence. This involves cordial reciprocally stimulating relations between the members of the teaching staff. It is generally agreed that no other factor counts for more in shaping the character of the young than personal influence. The best personal influence, however, is not unilateral, like that which radiates from a single teacher upon his class. The best is that which proceeds from cross-relations between a number of teachers. Just as in294 the home it is not the father singly, nor the mother singly, but the reciprocal relations between the two that touch child life to finer issues and create a spiritual atmosphere in the learner, so also in the school the best spirit is created by the relations of reciprocal furtherance between the teachers, each doing his work in such a way as to make easier and more successful the work of his colleagues, with a strong sense of partnership in the common work of man-building.
 
The teachers as an organized body should also relate themselves to an organized body of parents. Home and school should not merely co?perate but interpenetrate. The interests and efforts of both are centered on the same young lives. The home is supremely concerned in what goes on in the school, and the school in the kind of influence that prevails in the home. An organized conference of parents is in a position to render signal service to a school by appraising its ideals, by keeping tally on the extent to which acknowledged standards are carried out, and by joining in the unceasing endeavor to advance the standards. Schools must be backed by the interest and appreciation of the community. Parents whose children are pupils of a school are for that particular school the best representatives of the community.
 
The school is to prepare its charges, not only for vocational life, but for citizenship. Teachers must be good citizens. They cannot give what they do not possess. They must keep in living contact with the civic and social movements of the time.
 
The first and second types are instrumental to the third. Now here, if anywhere, a new departure in edu295cational philosophy is called for. For when we discuss this third kind of reverence, the question of all questions is raised: To what end do we educate? What is to be the aim and outcome of all our effort? And our answer to this question will depend on our philosophy, and if our philosophy is ethical our answer must be distinctively ethical. Froebel was a pantheist, and his pantheism colored his conception of the educational end. Pestalozzi was an eighteenth century humanitarian. Many modern writers on education are biological evolutionists. Others even expressly disclaim any general outlook, and appear to be exclusively interested in perfecting the technique of schoolmastering. Reverence of the third type is reverence for the undeveloped human being,—for the new generation, for our successors. What is it that we are to revere in a child? Its spiritual possibilities, its latent personality. To bring to birth its personality is the supreme educational end. We show our reverence for the child in the effort to personalize it. Let us consider in brief some of the practical consequences of this idea.
 
To personalize the individual the first step is to discover the empirical substratum in his nature. There is ever an empirical substratum subject to ethical transformations. The empirical substratum of personality is individuality! Individuality manifests itself in a leading interest of some kind, a predominant bias which indicates the thing which the individual is fit to be and do. To discover the bent or bias is the first step, and the difficulties in the way of taking even this first step are admittedly great. Children and even adolescents296 often show no marked intellectual preferences whatever. Many adults too appear to be neutral so far as their mental life is concerned. Circumstances ran them perhaps into a certain mould—they might have been run into some other just as well. It is the task of the educator to discover the predominant interest where it exists, and to try to produce such an interest where it does not. What nature has not done in such cases art must attempt.
 
When the leading interest is found it should next be made the means of creating interest in subjects to which the pupil is naturally indifferent or even averse. I have illustrated the process here implied in a paper on the prevocational art school which is connected with the Ethical Culture School. Young persons devoted to art are often unwilling to take up subjects which seem to them unrelated to what they really care for, like science and history. They are obsessed by a single passionate ambition. They are all eagerness to become artists—to draw, paint, model, etc. Time spent on any other subject seems to them misspent. If indulged in this one-sided activity, the chances are that they will not even become competent artists. In any case they will lack breadth and vision. They will lack a cultural background. They will be inferior as human beings. They will not be personalized. For personality, on its mental as well as on its social side, depends on relatedness,—depends not so much on what one does, as on the interrelation between what one does and what other people do.
 
In order to expand the interest of the young art student, the method employed in the school just mentioned297 is to present those subjects which appear to be alien in such a way as to bring out the art aspects of them, the contact points between them and art. Thus in history special prominence is given to the age of Pericles, the age of Rembrandt. In science special attention is paid to the theory of color, the chemistry of etching. And all other branches of knowledge are treated similarly. The aim is not indeed to exploit t............