Taking Education As Vocation:the Study On Educator’s Calling

The calling roots from the requirement of education, it is a sacred duty been endowed by education. This calling is hidden behind education, which is defined by the education itself. The existing of horizontal teacher is a respond to education. Education is an essential reason of the existing of teachers. In other words, teacher is the one who makes a commitment to the sacred faith, and aims for protecting educational value, pursuing excellence performance, and taking care of others’ spiritual growth.However, in the context of economism and developmentlism of modernity, education tends to focus on cultivating man’s instrumentalize function, and assesses achievement only through intelligence and scores. And no wonder, education has abandoned the sacred calling of raising soul, fostering spiritual growth and pursuing tobe brilliant.Modern education turns to become value deviation,and the instrumental value of education has gone far beyond the ultimate value. Under the guidance of the values mentioned above, teachers, who are supposed to burden the calling of cultivation, have spontaneously leaved their mission behind, rejected to think about what is the true value of education, ignored the real objective of it, and shirked their responsibility. Teachers consider education as occupation or profession to make a living, however, professionalism and specialization eliminate the righteousness of that calling, which leads to separation between job and the meaning of life, profession and moral pursuing. As a result, it is impossible for teachers to find happiness from their education life, they feel tired of it, and have no passion for it, and being ordinary. Teachers’ metal state in reality urges us to rethink what does education really need, and why specialized teachers can’t get rid of the ordinary spirit.Modern dilemma of education and metal state of teachers are calling educators who are equipped with the sense of mission and whose meaning and value of their life can be realized only through education. Educator is the model of teachers, and excellent qualities of educators show teachers the right direction.The study on educator’s calling aims to reveal that calling is a spiritual power for teachers to engage education, to consciously choose education as their career pursuing.We look forward to be able to bring some discussions and conclusions and the significance of them is our point in this study.This study is divided into four parts. The first part is an analysis of modern dilemma of education, in which three aspects would be demonstrated:education’s devaluation, education’s utilitarianism and the education’s instrumentalization. Furthermore, modern teachers’mental state will be analyzed, and it indicates that teachers are lack of rational spirit and ignore to think about the true value of education. Meanwhile, the systematic management with control system further leads mediocrity of teachers’ spiritual. The fact is that it is obvious teachers have already forgotten their calling, and voluntarily gave up their commitment to the value of education. Hence, educators who are equipped with the sense of mission need to be called to heal the illness, and cure education.In the second part, we contrast teachers’ working spiritual and personality traits respectively in aspects of occupation, profession, and vocation.Basedon that, itindicates that teachers are lack of the state of being aware of burdening their calling. This conclusion could be clarified by the fact that vocation ethics has been replaced by work ethics which stems from professionalism and specialization. From the perspective of vocation ideal, two questions are solved:why educators are the ones who are equipped by the sense of calling, and what is the essential meaning of educators’ calling. So far, it is clear that educators consciously choose calling as their ideal, and it is an expression of taking responsibility of education value. The third part is about the performance of educators’ calling and characters which educators are supposed to be equipped will be demonstrated from three aspects as follows: education virtue, education idea and education spiritual.Based on what we discussed above, the fourth part is focus on that educators’ calling can only be achieved in educational practice. In that way, educational practice would be combined with educational ideal, excellent schools would be created through educational action, the spiritual temperament of school would be remodeled, positive teachers’ community would be built, eventually, equality, fraternity teacher-student relationship would be formed.