Teacher’s Calling

A couple of weeks back I wrote a supportive Review of the Politeia Report on teacher employment and retention.  Subsequently I realised that I had missed something, but it was only last evening that I realised that the very thing which is central to why I am a teacher (and why I keep going long after logic says give up) is totally missing from this Report.  It is the concept of vocation, a compelling sense that, in the fullness of what you think life is all about, you have an individual ‘calling’ to a specific task.

Vocation comes from the Latin word “vocare” meaning “to call” – a sense that there is something almost unique in the role that you personally have to undertake.  Priests are said to have a vocation, otherwise they simply would not do what they do.  In a secular world such a religious view of life may antagonise some, but to many such a calling is an inexplicable reality.  Many nurses feel such a calling as do some doctors, social workers, artists and very many teachers.  Vocationalism is to professionalism what a covenant is to a contract – it is loaded with deep emotional commitment.

People with a vocation are essentially self-starting, but they are not easy to manage; they tend to do only those things they believe in and, as they see it, which are in the best interest of the children.  They will fight any authority that forces them to do something they don’t approve of.  That is why schoolteachers never give politicians an easy ride.  Not that they always get it right, because they don’t.  But if politicians do not understand that without winning ‘the hearts and minds’ of teachers, they will never cooperate.  And it is cooperation that is needed because what happens in the classroom will always remain a long way from the expectations of the House of Commons and the intrusive eye of Ofsted.

It was the lack of any mention of vocation in the Politeia Report (as separate to vocational training) which I now see had completely escaped me.  This is vastly significant.  It is the bureaucrats’ indifference to the individual sense of vocationalism that explains so much about the difficulties in recruiting and retaining teachers.  To downplay the significance of vocation, or as in the case of recent government policy, to apparently regard it as being of no substance, is a key part of the explanation of the failure of so much recent educational legislation.

See Part Nine of Briefing Paper and Actions 5, 6 and 10

This article is tagged: politeia, vocation.