NetVUE Blog: Vocation Matters

“Many institutions offer (and market) curricular and co-curricular programming to prepare students with the necessary knowledge and skills—both the hard skills of the applied arts and the soft skills of the liberal arts—to contribute to the diverse professional contexts that they will enter after graduation. Students are prepared to understand, engage, and contribute to the world as it is. Perhaps it is less clear, or less clearly stated, however, that robust career preparation requires the intentional and focused cultivation of the imagination—the ability to dream, speculate, and create the world not as it is but as it might and should be.” 

“Vocations inform each other, and two of mine seem to be in constant dialogue, deep calling to deep: teaching and parenting. Often I’ve found that I carry aspects of the teacher’s call to my children, and—as I’ll explore in my upcoming series of posts—my parenting informs my pedagogy in return. I’m sure this is a common experience, but mine has a twist that keeps surprising me. This is because both of my children have autism.” 

“Years ago, in a series of wildly popular interviews, historian Joseph Campbell uttered these words: “Follow your bliss.” But never in his wildest dreams did he imagine what would become of them… It’s time to dispel this myth. I can hardly think of worse advice to give anyone trying to discern what to do with their life. Instead, we need to tell the truth.”