In professions known for producing heroes, teaching ranks among the top. As Christine Jeske observes in her chapter in Called Beyond Our Selves: Vocation and the Common Good, teaching is found among the short list of “‘good’ vocations” whose work is assumed by our society to flow out of an abundant generosity. Teachers are famously overworked and underpaid, and as a teacher educator I’m constantly mindful of this backdrop for much of my work, including the facilitation of vocational exploration and discernment among undergraduate students.
In her keynote address at the 2024 NetVUE Conference, Meghan Sullivan, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, offered insight into how and why we can and should help our students deeply consider their callings. She reminded us that when students experience a lack of training, a lack of a sense of vocation, and a lack of being formed and habituated in a great community when they’re young, they can more easily come to believe that everything truly is about them. The result of this lack of formation can lead to a pursuit of money and power as if nothing else is worth aiming for in life. Sometimes, these students can eventually acquire enough power to destroy the common good.
With this unsettling prospect in mind, we reflected together on a modern-day “monster” and our own students’ potential to develop similar, harmful leadership styles. Though compelled by the description of this trajectory, I did not immediately connect it to my own students’ paths. Is there even a scenario in which a person majors in early childhood education from a motivation to pursue money and power? Isn’t the very pursuit of such powerless, thankless, and low-paying work a humble and selfless endeavor? Maybe. But the admonitions do apply, and in ways that are potentially even more impactful on the common good than what we find in the corporate world.
Referencing Marx and Aristotle, Dr. Sullivan articulated the many ways that burnout and capitalism are not new concepts. She described Marx’s thoughts on how a lack of community and daily work that is closely connected to one’s function as a human being causes one to mistake the cheap things in life for the good life. “In the absence of being able to come up with a really defined, unified way of life around a deeper mission,” she said, “we just let our students become addicted to what Aristotle calls ‘the getting of goods’.”
What constitutes “the getting of goods” for students pursuing a profession with limited potential for power and financial reward? One option may be in what Marjorie Hass describes in her forward to Called Beyond Our Selves: “Young people are encouraged to develop a personal influencer brand and to think seriously about hopping into the gig economy.” Aspiring teachers in our current climate are not immune to these influences, as Forbes recently reported and as evidenced by the fact that #teacher on TikTok currently has 4.8M posts with 93.8B views.
However, even these impressive numbers represent only a minority of our nation’s teachers and possibly an even smaller percentage of those who will graduate from NetVUE colleges and universities. I propose that a temptation much more commonly faced by students in our teacher education programs is what Dr. Sullivan described as “start[ing] to replace your bigger, more ambitious sense of what the work is with something that’s simpler.” She pointed us to the modern-day applicability of Aristotle’s observations of people in Greek city-states when she said that “the lack of a clear and deep enough goal can absolutely lead people to substitute in cheap goals in their place” and “the cause of this state of mind is that their interests are set upon life but not upon the good life.”
For preservice teachers, often the simpler and cheaper goal is to hold onto old, familiar concepts about education that remind them of their own positive experiences in the education system but ignore the needs of today’s children, adolescents, and their families. The impact of our graduates’ choosing to revert to outdated and unsubstantiated approaches over “the more ambitious sense of what the work is” can have a devastating effect on the common good.
In 2022, researchers at Vanderbilt University published a landmark study on the long-term impact of Tennessee’s public pre-kindergarten programs. Against a landscape of increasing national attention and financial investment in these types of programs, the results of their study sent shock waves through the education world: “Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children, with the strongest negative effects in sixth grade. A negative effect was also found for disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.”
Deeper dives into the results of this longitudinal study are revealing that many classroom practices failed to integrate the research-based, anti-bias, contextualized and trauma-informed approaches that students learn in our teacher preparation programs. Financial investments and teacher credentials are not enough for educational programming to promote the common good. Teachers and administrators must themselves be fully formed by “the more ambitious sense of what the work is.”
Moved by Dr. Sullivan’s powerful, accessible, and applicable keynote address, I am more compelled than ever to engage in the hard work of my own vocation of facilitating the deeper formation experiences that my students need. Her reminders of the philosophical underpinnings of this work were especially impactful, as was the redirection to our mission as guiding the work. I am fortunate to serve as a teacher educator at a university whose founder was a teacher educator himself, the patron saint of teachers St. John Baptist De La Salle, who said, “To be entrusted with the teaching of the young is a great gift and grace of God.”
Rebecca Pruitt is an associate professor of education at Lewis University near Chicago, Illinois, where she has also served as a leader in The DISCOVER Initiative since 2014. She is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow and was a member of the 2017 cohort of the Faculty Seminar on Teaching Vocational Exploration.
