LOST SENSE OF VOCATION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23795, 29 April 1939, Page 7

LOST SENSE OF VOCATION

Discussing modern industrial conditions, Mr J. G. Lockhart, writes in the Listener that we have still got to explain the increasing absence of any sense of vocation in the work that men and women are doing. To some extent, though not entirely, this is the result of mechanisation. You can hardly expect'a man to take much interest in his work, when this consists in performing, over and over again, some apparently meaningless operation on some apparently meaningless lump of steel. He may never see the raw material; he may never handle the finished product. His is the work not of a craftsman, as his father was, but of a robot, He has all the fatigue of labour without any of the satisfaction of creation. That in itself is a big problem about which a good deal might be said, but it does not, by any means, altogether explain the loss of a sense of vocation, for you And this not merely in mass production factories, but in mines, on the land, and in offices, everywhere, though, of course, in varying degrees, where men and women are working.