When I introduce students to Frederick Buechner’s adage about being called to “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” I ask them which side of that Venn diagram they think has been underemphasized in their prior learning about vocation. Most often they mention that “the world’s deep hunger” needs more attention. This might be true, or maybe they think it’s what I want to hear. Perhaps they have been told so often that they are part of a self-centered generation that it has made them reluctant to seek their own gladness or name it as valuable. Recently, however, an insightful minority report stood out. A student responded that they might have been told to focus on themselves, but they sure haven’t been encouraged to seek deep gladness. If anything, they’ve been told to focus on themselves by building their resumes.
Many college students have been asked to pin their validity to a career-oriented specialization since early in high school. It is commonplace for adults to ask teenagers, often while knowing little else about them, What are you planning to do in college? On its face this doesn’t sound like an aggressive question, but acceptable answers are relatively few, and “I don’t know,” or, “I want to explore various subjects to discover my passions” are not among them. Young people grasp that this question invites them to conceal their diverse sources of joy and inspiration behind a façade that suggests clear knowledge of future earning potential.
This narrow view constitutes a significant blind spot in prevailing conceptions of education and its connection to purpose. It is also dehumanizing, which became starkly evident to me while teaching the capstone course for our Integrated Studies program. Integrated Studies is inherently interdisciplinary, and the purpose of the capstone course is to help students think about how breadth of learning can be good preparation for life and work. The only assigned text is David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Throughout the course, we reflect on Epstein’s arguments and examples and relate them to broader questions about calling and purpose.
Initially, I thought it might be a struggle to engage students in thinking about breadth during their final semester of college as they readied themselves to enter the workforce. I could not have been more mistaken. Not only did they comprehend the relevance, but they also seemed to have been dying to hear that breadth is valuable. They were elated and relieved by Epstein’s illustrations and even a little angry that they hadn’t encountered them before.
My students’ reactions underscore a fundamental denial of their humanity by a culture fixated on specialization. One student wrote in a reading response that “the overwhelming stress to pick a career and hobbies and to ‘become the greatest person in that field’ held me back for so long [. . .]. It made me feel left out and worthless.” Unfortunately, these feelings persisted for her throughout college. At the culmination of her degree program, she lamented, “I feel like I missed so much of the importance of college because of the push for specificity and the need to choose a major that would determine the rest of my life.” This was written by a person with wide-ranging interests, someone who is adept at finding meaning and purpose in various activities. And our system of education failed to validate those traits and capacities. No wonder she resonated with Epstein’s anecdotes of “successful” people whose sources of gladness transcend conventional career trajectories. “I never would have thought that notable people really had lives outside of their ‘important’ careers,” she wrote.
I had anticipated scholarly responses to Epstein’s theories about how learning works, but what I received were profoundly human reflections on what it feels like to be liberated from the pressure to be just one thing. “After completing the reading and lecture I honestly felt relief,” another student wrote. It is heartening to comprehend that life is a little more like jazz than a strategic game, and that the best improvisers relish diverse pursuits regardless of their resume appeal. It’s also a good reminder that pursuits solely driven by joy are paradoxically worth a lot of money. As a third student articulated, “This book and class are authentically helping me come to grips with the idea that I might be doing myself a disservice by staying in a job for which I have no enthusiasm—or entering into a career field for which I have no enthusiasm just to chase a higher paycheck.” This response suggests that the way education functions, even in a supposedly self-centered society, is profoundly careless of selves and their deep gladness. It disregards students’ dignity by overlooking their true wellsprings of happiness.
When we instrumentalize education, we also diminish our students because deep gladness is ordinary, enigmatic, and deeply human. In her chapter in At This Time and In This Place, Caryn Riswold contends that authentic education humanizes. It trains us to notice and affirm human dignity in its multifaceted manifestations, in part by revealing how such dignity can be obscured or denied in our histories, institutional structures, and imaginations. “We read the world so that we might recognize and challenge dehumanizing limits when and where they exist,” Riswold writes. This includes acknowledging our students among those who, “whether through direct interactions or less overt means, are encouraged to think of themselves as less than fully human.” While many universities are making strides in confronting overt forms of dehumanization by scrutinizing enrollment strategies, course design, and hiring practices, subtler threats to human dignity remain inadequately examined.
When we compel young people to discern a specific career path as early as high school, or encourage them to spend time only on resume-building activities in college, we fail to honor their complete humanity. Instead of asking the question, What’s your major?, we should embrace questions like, What brings you joy? As workers in a humanizing field, we are responsible for developing our awareness of the depths and variety of human gladness. Our students yearn for this acknowledgment.
Justin Klassen is an associate professor of theology & religious studies at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, where he also serves on the Mission Council. He is a NetVUE Faculty Fellow, and was a member of the 2021 cohort of the Faculty Seminar on Teaching Vocational Exploration. He is the author of a recent op-ed on the value and purpose of a college education. For more posts by Justin, click here.