Education: authority and vocation

EDUCATION/ Where have authority and vocation gone?

A century ago, Weber asked himself "why do people obey?" Today the question is reversed: "why don’t people obey anymore?". Authority has gone. It has been worn out and, a little at a time, has been de-legitimized.

Authority based on tradition was probably the first to be eroded away. The authority of the eternal yesterday diminished rapidly when the new dethroned the inheritance, when that which arrived was revealed to be not only superior quantitatively, but also qualitatively more effective than what was there before. This process did not characterize only work techniques, but also the models of organization of politics and economics of the past that derived from those techniques, which have gradually been taken out of circulation by the new regulatory principles. Even today, when we speak about the crisis of authority, we tend to be speaking about the crisis of those expressing the skills, rules and behaviors of a universe that no longer exists.

The picture is different if one considers bureaucratic and legal authorities. In fact, these areas are still highly respected, but only where the organizations are functionally related to a real process of qualification, selection and control. Teachers working in professionally qualifying schools, where the prestige of the degree obtained is confirmed by an immediate entry into employment or accreditation from a recognized institution of higher learning, can count on a sufficient compliance with their rules and, thus, their authority. The opposite occurs, instead, where the prestige of the title is generic, or even low, and the functional link with the world of work is completely random or otherwise independent from the quality of the results achieved.
However, when one speaks of the crisis of authority one means something fundamentally different: the loss of credibility in itself, i.e. the ability to be influential and recognized in connection with a close bond that links the functions one performs to one’s own person. This does not happen everywhere, but only in those roles, some more or less important, which are accompanied by a vocational choice. Many authority figures are included in this sphere. For example, a priest is not just a "the expert at the divine worship," but also a person who, in a very specific way, is entirely devoted to a specific mission in the world. The same goes for those who are fathers and, more generally, for those who live their function in terms of a personal choice of vocation.

In a more modest but no less important way, the teacher is seen as someone who has made his career choice on the basis of a personal decision, made in relation to moral and civic values rather than material interests.

The lack of respect for authority here shows a failure to recognize this vocational component. Everything occurs as if those who perform these roles were perceived as people who had found themselves in that role randomly. A father who is not respected is, first of all, a father who is not recognized in his vocational dimension. He is a "father-by-chance", that is, independently of his own will, he finds himself performing this function and is not a party to it except in a formal and institutional way. It is not his own, he did not "marry it". A teacher, who is not respected, too, is a professional who is not recognized in his vocational dimension, who is then "teaching-by-chance" and could have filled any other position in public administration. The problem of the lack of respect for authority, therefore, is a direct result of the lack of visibility of the vocational dimension present in all these roles and functions that explicitly or inexplicitly presuppose it.

This is the real heart of the problem: from what does the lack of recognition of the vocational dimension derive? It is not always the fault of the father, the priest, or the educator. They are not always the first to obscure the vocational dimension, judging it "too cumbersome" and favoring a disillusioned "professionalism" that is completely enclosed in its institutional profile. More often, the framework of social roles intervenes a priori. A teacher is believed a priori not to have a vocation for his work, a father a priori does not have a vocation for his role and, at least in the past, when anti-clericalism was the dominant ideology, a priest a priori had no vocation but was filling the role for material reasons. In our society, the very term "vocation" is obsolete. We got rid of it very quickly, as a moral burden that was too heavy and conceptually unmanageable, without realizing that it was the basis for our authority.

The lack of recognition of authority figures in this case is directly mirrored by the invisibility of the vocational dimension, the call of the "heart" which is the basis and support of all manifestations of authority. When it is missing, not seen, or not recognized, only the formal role, the position occupied, remains and that is not enough and cannot be enough.

Salvatore Abruzzese

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