Christian students who are seeking answers to questions no-one else is asking may get help from this book. That's the kind of book it is supposed to be: here is an answer to a question that, on the surface, is straight forward and ordinary. Many students, Christians among them, consider this question, will answer it as best they can, and then move on. What is a student and why did I become one?
Well, the answer that seems to satisfy many is a straight forward explanation. A student is a person who studies and a person becomes a student in order to study the things that a student studies. And that's about it.
Somehow, somewhere, the idea has taken hold that an answer to a question like this can be answered by giving a definition. You give your definition, try and commit it to memory, take it with as you go through life, and move on. Simple. But this book is not written for those students who gain satisfaction with this definitional answer. It is written for Christian students who do not want to put this book down and get on with the rest of their lives until they have clarified for themselves the meaning and the purpose of their student task. This book is written for those who sense that their studies are a part of their vocation, their purpose in life.
This book is written for Christian students who are asking questions and who find it hard to give themselves satisfying answers. They have a deep down sense that there is more that they need to understand about themselves, their task in this life and indeed about the meaning and the purpose of their studies. Sure, the above answer will be accepted by them as an accurate definition to begin with. But they will sense that the big questions in our student life, as in the rest of our experience, cannot really be answered by neat definitions. This book is written for those who sense there is more that needs to be said.
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For starters let's recall that I drew attention to the possibility that a particular type of Christian student might find help from this book. Christian students may indeed want to start off by saying that they are viewing the student task in a Christian way. Christian students who are concerned about the meaning of the term "Christian student" will not be satisfied merely by giving a definition of the student role. There are other matters that need to be clarified.
Ø What is it exactly that I am studying? What is the significance of these studies for my life?
Ø How should I see my student work in relation to the rest of my life?
Ø How does my faith in Jesus relate to the way I investigate whatever it is that I am studying?
If, as we think about these kinds of questions we become aware that it is God's Kingdom that gives meaning to our studies, we will have begun to see that a Christian student is someone who is on "active service". The Christian student is a person who knows that the student role is not just some process that everyone has to go through in order to get qualifications; being a student is a vocation. We are called to study and to actively develop our understanding in all the possible areas of God's Kingdom. That's heady stuff. That's part of the problem which the Christian student faces and why it seems at times we are seeking an answer to questions not many of our peers are asking. So, if I am still holding your attention - and I admit I may have lost you - then we will indeed enter into complex issues that need to be explored.
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Yes, it's hard work getting started. We have to begin our studies, like we begin anything else, and as we do so we have to come to terms with ourselves and the task before us. If you are like me then when you begin one of the first things you become aware of is your own lack of preparation! Should I be starting out now?
Of course students are not the only people to confront this kind of question. Study is never the only thing we do. At the very least we have to sharpen our pencil and eat, if not cook, our dinner. We form a lifestyle that relates us to other people. From an early age we've had to learn to do lots of things and by the time we get to university, our own adult lives are beginning to take shape - maybe we are thinking about leaving home; we might be trying to find work, as well as maintaining our friendships. We will be planning other things we want to do as well, developing a daily and weekly routine, keeping a diary and developing our own set of rituals to keep in touch. Our social life is indeed many faceted, and is still at the back of our minds when we are trying to give our studies the attention they deserve. So as we begin to discover what being a student demands of us, we also begin to realise that choices have to be made about our use of time - what priority do we give our studies in relation to all the other kinds of things we do.
This is not just a peripheral issue that can be left to sort itself out without our own involvement. It is an important issue because it requires us to make our own boundaries, to develop our own disciplines. When we get clear in our own minds why we are studying we will then be able to decide how important our studies are to us relative to the other things we are doing. And until we clarify our commitment to the student task we will find that study will be crowded out by all the other things that we can't help doing.
There are many students who pass through university courses without giving this crucial question the attention it deserves. It's just too hard for them. No matter how brilliant or average their results they still have not clarified this central question. In fact they have avoided it. They seem satisfied with an answer in the past tense. The value of their endeavour is measured by the time they have spent doing it. But ask "Why?" and they will answer, "This is what I have always done!" Presumably they are students, or professors, because they cannot think of anything else to do.
Sure, among your fellow students you will encounter some who will tell you that they are studying in order to get a degree. Some will go further and assure you that their studies have a purpose because they are wanting to work in a profession that requires a particular qualification. And that is what they do. They may even continue on to a doctorate and become highly qualified and internationally famous. And yet it is possible to do so, and go so far, without getting clear in one's own mind about the purpose of the student vocation. Study is just one of the things that are done in the flux of life. And that's about it. Or is it?
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Some students, maybe it is only a minority, are uneasy because they are not sure why they have become students. Why are we studying? It is to such students that this book is written. I suppose I have to admit that I am wanting to address students who, just like myself, are dissatisfied with the conventional off-hand approach to questions like this. "You're too serious!" was something I was regularly told when I would ask questions similar to this. But what I have learnt is that when I got "serious" about such seemingly innocuous questions I also became self-aware - and it is in our own thoughts that we discover we are not always experts in answering our own questions. It may even be easier to answer questions raised by someone else. But then this can result in me avoiding the deep-down question rather than facing up to my own sense of unease.
So studying is not always easy. Right from the start there may be lots of questions which just don't go away.
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So how do we view our studies, ourselves and the world in which we live? Why are we studying? Rather than seeing these as questions for the "serious" I would suggest that we should consider them right from the outset of any discussion of Christian sociology.
Everyone has some sense of the meaning and purpose of life and when we are involved in study it helps to put this clearly into words. But how? Do we have insert a "deep and meaningful" part to our university essays? Not necessarily. After all, if the question is something we feel we can't avoid then we are assuming that it is a part of everyone's reality. When we are studying the terms "meaning" and "purpose" need to be given a clear definition. We can't avoid that. That is what we do, explicitly and/or implicitly as we move into our studies.
If this question is important then it confronts us whatever we are studying. It's something to consider in technical, job-oriented courses and students who view their course as a meal ticket will sometimes be surprised by the change of perspective that occurs when they accept that yes there's something here that they haven't thought about and should give some attention to. It confronts those studying natural sciences and mathematics as much as BA students in philosophy, history, social sciences, languages or any other humanities subject. It is an important problem for those studying theology just as much as for those who are in training to become engineers.
What started off as a self-defining question "What is a student?" very quickly becomes something like "What is science?" and "What is the meaning of our knowledge?" When we start reflecting upon ourselves as students we start raising questions like these that demand our thoughtful response.
Let's be clear though: to avoid this question is still to respond to it. We may not put it into words because we are uncertain about answering the questions others put to us. But as we progress in our studies we will return to questions like this again and again, sometimes even when we are unaware of it.
We all know the approach to study where a student is like being on an assembly line - simply producing "work" to please the teacher. Who will deny having adopted this approach? Apparently it's something drilled into us from our schooling. Once at university we see ourselves commuting to class to begin at 8am and then closing our books and returning home at 6pm. It is as if we have decided that university study should be undertaken in a time-table that models our future roles as 9-5 bureaucrats with a little bit of flexi-time added in to keep us sane and relaxed. Somehow we think this provides us with a sense of normality, of security. But the student task is not really about developing commuting routines.
And again we will have felt the temptation to see the student task as simply a matter of writing essays or writing up experiments which demonstrate we can put on paper what we have been reading in the library or testing in the laboratory. Being a student is simply doing what students do, churning out what students churn out, getting the course over and done with. And when we adopt such a style we actually find it difficult to seriously consider the question of the meaning of our studies. It is our own question after all, but somehow we have adopted an approach to studying in which we not only avoid difficult personal questions - we discover we are avoiding ourselves, or worse - we never realise that we have been avoiding ourselves until it is too late. We can even keep it up until our third or fourth year by which time we have already developed habits of mind which prepare us for leaving the university and entering the workforce. We may have spent 3 years assuming, or hoping, that there will be a job "out there" waiting for us. When we adopt such an approach we assume that we are just like all students, whatever their values or world view, and we are simply studying because we are doing a course in order to get a job. In such a frame of mind there is not much point in thinking about the meaning of one's studies. Why concern yourself with questions that can't be answered anyway? And thus we prepare the basis for a cynical and moderately comfortable life-style.
So we can go a long way in ignoring our own sense of unease, but if we give ourselves time to think seriously about this we can discern that such an avoidance is derived from an answer we have already given to the question we have asked. The answer we have given involves us in trying to avoid it. Such an answer tries to devalue the questions that make us uneasy with ourselves to begin with. When we come to view the "meaning question" as a waste of time we nevertheless cannot escape the fact that we have answered it; our answer implies that our meaning has been found by avoiding the question itself. We have tried to address a big issue and as a result discovered that we are at odds with ourselves, we have fought with none other than ourselves, and we have lost.
This book is aimed social science students who agree that the "meaning question" needs to be addressed. I sincerely hope this book can help them because it is also my attempt to document my efforts to take my own deep-down "meaning" questions seriously. But I am also keen to persuade cynical students that a Christian social perspective can help us better understand ourselves and our ambiguous and contradictory responses to the "meaning question". The "meaning question" about our studies needs to be confronted because it is an issue that cannot be avoided even while we claim to ignore it. Cynicism is a viewpoint that arises from within our social life. Since we have seen our own cynicism at work in our own self-questioning, do we not need to explain why it is so widespread?
There is one other possibility which we should not ignore at this point. The "meaning question" about our studies needs to be confronted because it is an issue that we can avoid even while we claim to deal with it. Read that again in relation to the final sentences of the last paragraph. Yes, we can adopt forms of words to satisfy ourselves, or try to persuade ourselves, that we are really "on track" but in fact we have been fooling ourselves. We need to find a way to be truthful and this requires we find a way to be truly self-critical.
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So here I am aiming to give a Christian perspective on how to begin to think about the issues studied in social science. I suppose I have a dream of generating an audience which includes Christian students who may, deep down, think that this book is unnecessary. And so, to "cut the mustard" and argue for a Christian sociology, I will have to find a persuasive form of argument. How do you reach cynical students? Well first one has to face and counter one's own cynicism. That way one begins by showing an ability to work at persuading oneself; then students can begin to see that such argument is an invitation to get involved self-critically in their own studies.
So that is my attempt to begin with an important Christian principle. To present a Christian view means arguing in a way that is logically satisfying, that also deals with our own deep-down reservations as much as our "up front" convictions. We have to cultivate a truthful approach. We'll have more to say on this as we go along. For the moment I'm wanting to emphasize that being a Christian student means working out the implications of a distinctive world-view. It means coming to a better understanding of how our approach to life has influenced the way we already study the world, how our taken-for-granted view already shapes our contribution to all our social relationships, and also how our actual thinking is often inconsistent with what we profess to be the meaning and purpose of our lives.
To put meaning and purpose into words is to discover how hard it can be to explain ourselves and what we are doing. Students just like us freak out when these issues come to the fore. Others get tongue-tied. Still others stay confused or even get bitter and pessimistic. That's us too. Some decide studying is not for them and others get to work. That may not be us. It's hard work getting started as a student because when you become a student you start thinking about your thoughts, and this means you are being confronted, face to face, with yourself and the purpose of your own life. No small issue this.
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August 2004 © A
Christian Calling in Social Theory and Research is a work written by
Bruce C Wearne (PhD), 29 Lawrence Rd., Point Lonsdale Vic 3225 AUSTRALIA,
61-3-5258-3913. Each chapter may be photocopied or retransmitted in its
entirety only with full acknowledgement of the author and the source. It shall
not otherwise be reprinted or transmitted without permission. This
personal project aims to encourage a positive Christian student engagement
in universities around the world which need to better understand the vocation
of science as an expression of our love for God and our neighbour. Your
comments are welcome. Email can be sent to bcwearne@ozemail.com.au
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~bcwearne/index.html