Calling of education: challenges and achievements of independence

Education is a broad way to the individual, collective and societal success and independence: it consists of pedagogical efforts, learning and upbringing. All these components are united in educational communication that revealed personal vocation to some job and future profession, on the one hand, and spiritual strategic calling of life. The vocation itself is a challenge for the individual, local community and for the state, because it often requires the effort of all forces and the full revealing of one’s creative potential – to get a good citizen and successful member of community. At the same time, it is through the implementation of his/her vocation that the individual receives the resources and abilities giving him/her the strength and ability to respond to numerous external challenges. To give a proper answer for these challenges personality should find own core, reveals oneself and choose priority values. To get some benefits from job as a vocation it is necessary to find your calling in life – its main, strategic purpose, its intrinsic meaning: our calling gives us goals and our vocation gives us means to achieve these goals. Friedrich Nietzsche called for a genuine academic freedom as only honorable aim for student and researcher and gave a radical critique for the university bureaucracy and academic officialism. Such systematic and total criticism, not as nihilism, but as a component of the systematic search for an authentic vocation and sacred calling, is taught by education, and best of all, by academic education. Independence is not a gift or a trophy, it is a state of searching for one’s own authenticity and a sense of pleasure in the struggle for it. Therefore, independence can and should be both personal and common – because human is always no less a social being in unity with others than in gaining his/her own autonomy through others.

came to Ukrainization much earlier compared to secondary school, as in almost everything else, but in the field of higher education, Ukrainization is still not without problems. However, the independence of the Ukrainian education system and the Ukrainian higher education in particular could not be reduced to Ukrainization -the key issue is the presence and strength of the desire to gain independence in education as part of state independence of Ukraine. Every affair that going to be successful must be preceded by the experience of this affair as a personal vocation of its participants -if not all, then at least the key figures, the leaders of this affair.

Vocation and independence
Independence is not just a political phenomenon. Rather, it is worth talking about political or state independence as an integral result of mutual coordination of individual independence of citizens -their self-sufficiency as capable of making their own reasonable judgment ], as capable of materially implementing such a judgment in practice ], and last but not least as able to show the will to such individual and collective, personal and joint self-realization ]. In order to acquire all these qualities, citizens have yet to become citizens. This can happen mostly spontaneously , or mostly consciously ]. In any case, we are talking about a certain education that is given to the citizens either by the history and realities of public life, or by specialized educational institutions. The first, life-historical version of education gives more reliable results, but it is characterized by too high a price (often the cost of millions of lives) and the need to gain extended historical experience. The second is institutional option that has a number of advantages that due to them it is some shortcomings and possible unwished side-or by-effects. In any case, if we talk about state independence, it is based on the national idea, without the development and cultivation of which such independence not only loses its legitimacy, but also loses motivation to defend it among the citizens of this state [Boichenko, & Rudenko 2020]. The calling of education, therefore, will inevitably also nurture the national idea -because education is always provided by one specific people to other specific people, including those determined by their citizenship.
On the other hand, traditionally, calling, according to the German theologian and founder of Protestantism Martin Luther ] (especially after the conceptualization of Luther's position by Max Weber ), tend to be seen as a characteristic of a profession. However, if we delve into theology, the very presence of man on Earth is a vocation -because this stay is the result of God's plan, Providence: the Lord gave the Earth to Adam and his descendants at their disposal and commanded them to Україна і українська освіта: 30 років незалежності 26 be good masters. It is from these positions that education should be viewed as a vocation -broadly, not as narrowly as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno took -only as a teacher's vocation [Adorno 2020]. The teacher job satisfaction is the point of contemporary scientific research ]. Education has a calling to make human being a person: a potential person should become an actual person. Whether is it a religious version of actualization, or a secular, or some other, albeit posthumanistic one.
Thus, between the very specific definition of the educational vocation as a professional training of students and the professional work of a teacher, and another, on the contrary, too abstract definition of education as a calling to make human being a person, there is a calling of education as an implementation of a national idea of the own state. This middle link is not just formally logically middle one -that is, not just average in scope -but also performs a unifying function, as well as a mediation function for a more specific and abstract definition of education as a vocation and calling, inextricably combining them in intense interconnection.
Not only the national idea is such a middle ground -in this role the church once emerged (and to some extent still emerges), the same mission is now claimed by various multinational corporations, as well as various international and supranational entities -and may be claimed by others social institutions and social systems. Yet so far it is the national idea -grounded not so much ethnically as politically -that underlies the modern integral understanding of calling.
In turn, the need and desire to build their own independent state and to fight for it gives citizens a sense of their vocation, their involvement in the common cause, their sense of meaning in their lives as individuals, including not least -through their participation in public life [Cuzhva 2017]. In the field of education, it ultimately works as an active, conscious and creative participation of citizens in the formation, functioning and development of their own national educational system. Of course, few people think about this mission in the categories of the system -it is enough simply to act systematically for the benefit of state independence, including in sphere of teaching and learning.
So, have we already gained independence in its educational dimension? Does the Ukrainian education system have its own idea that can provide a strategy to respond to all possible challenges -global, regional and local?

Pedagogy as a vocation: specific tasks
It is not uncommon to hear of a successful and beloved teacher that he/she is a "teacher by God's bless" or, in a more secularized and scientific version, that he/she is a teacher by vocation. Pedagogy, like other professions, can have its high-class specialists, can have enthusiasts among them and could even have peculiar ascetics of its business: you could just do your job well, you could love it and dedicate much more of your life to it than is usually given to profession, and you could in a whole give up everything in life for the sake of this cause. However, such asceticism does not always give good results -and for the person himself, who may not gain or even lose family and friends because of such professional bigotry, or have them only in their profession, but also it is not good for the profession itself, because excessive diligence often leads to distortions and undesirable extremes, when one profession begins to prevail of over all others and unreasonably oppose itself as allegedly "noble" or "real" in contrast to them. Obviously, even the professions of a teacher or a doctor do not have the right to do so, although if that were possible, it is likely that very these professions would deserve it more than others.
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno, based on his own experience and observations of education in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century, saw a public rejection of the teaching profession [Adorno 2020]. It is noteworthy that such disappointment in the figure of a teacher was preceded by a general fascination with the teaching profession, which was characteristic of the same Germans in the late nineteenth century, and flourished in Ukraine in Soviet times: suffice it to mention the names of national favorites Vasyl Sukhomlinsky and Anton Makarenko. Naturally: the deeper the charm, the bitter the disappointment. However, if the fascination is still largely if not fair in fact, then justified in effect, then the disappointment causes great and irreparable damage: for society, and for the teachers themselves, and most importantly -for children. The fascination to teacher is justified by the fact that, contributing to the formation of the child, revealing of child's talents, teacher creates something that not existed before: he/she is like a magician, and therefore deserves to be enchanted, even in spite of possible side effects.
Religious fervor -overt or covert -is inappropriate in assessing the importance of a profession, because only in its entirety all professions reflect the logic and morality of the social division of labor, which was classically glorified by the French philosopher and sociologist Emile Durkheim ]. One can understand the reasons for such a "transfer" -from church to profession -of religious feeling. On the one hand, the processes of secularization have led to the loss of authority of religion and the church and the transfer of religious feelings to non-religious objects, giving the status of "sacred" on the secular things. The German-American philosopher and sociologist Thomas Luckmann wrote in detail about this ]. On the other hand, it is not surprising that during the era of industrialization, the transfer of religious feelings took place precisely in the field of labor, which is the place of application of most professions. Instead of a weekly communion, there is a weekly payment of a salary, new rituals, new holidays, a new cult and a new dogma -related to professional activities.
Such beatification, sanctification, and in some places even almost literal deification are visible in modern pedagogy: there are its saints -the founders of pedagogical schools and denominations, its monasteries and monastic orders, its ordination levels, its holy gifts and its sins. An ardent atheist will see this as an evil caricature, a Protestant will see Lord's inscrutable ways and a completely justified and natural interpretation of the whole world as God's temple, and accordingly of human life as service to the Lord and professional activity as fulfillment of God's plan. Thus in a daily life of teachers, as well as in any other profession, it is possible to find enough proofs both for radical skepticism, and for excessive optimism: the person is capable of everything.

Ways of knowledge: gnoseology, epistemology, didactics, pedagogy
It should be noted that education has never been a matter for teachers alone, much less for professional teachers only. At all times, teaching was not only at school, but also in the family and in the local community with the help of neighbors, friends, etc. Knowledge came to child in very different ways, and only the Enlightenment subordinated most of it to science and education related to it. Henceforth, the path to pedagogy necessarily began with the science of cognition (gnoseology), the results of which were organized, systematized into a single scientific picture of the world and explained by meta-science or the science of scientific, theoretical knowledge (epistemology), on the base of such a system of theoretical knowledge it was developed a system of methodology and methods of teaching selected scientific knowledge (didactics), and only after coordination with all these authorities it is constructed the science of learning that should work as a central element of education (pedagogy). The upbringing in this linear scheme was not provided, because knowledge was perceived as an obvious benefit, fo which everyone instinctively strives like a sunflower for the sun. Therefore, upbringing was seen as a concomitant process in which only accents could be placed, because the main edifying and humanizing function is allegedly already performed by learning itself. However, we will return to upbringing a little later in this paper.
First of all, it should be recognized that pedagogy cannot be responsible for the entire education of the individual -it seeks to form primarily a certain knowledge base, a framework of knowledge to which all other knowledge can be attached and from which they can be further expanded. Of course, professional pedagogical work gives much better results, in particular because it is guaranteed, for certain target issues, however, education includes the whole array of social knowledge, not all of which is developed and prepared for their provision by professional teachers. The sociology of knowledge, which was in fact more of a philosophical science, has worked well to define social knowledge as the totality of human social experience, since its founder, the German phenomenologist Max Scheler , and the famous German and American representatives Karl Mannheim ], Alfred Schütz [Schutz 2003], Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann ], Bernhard Waldenfels ] and others. These authors unequivocally proved that, firstly, social cognition, and accordingly social learning is carried out not only and not so much in specialized educational institutions, and secondly, in these institutions education is carried out not only as a translation of articulated and systematized knowledge.
We can see that we are used to talking about a version of pedagogy based on scientific approaches and methods and scientific subject base. But pedagogy was not always in such gestalt, it only mostly became so with the beginning of the Enlightenment. Moreover, even since then, science has explained only a small part of reality, although it is a most part of the reality that is available to humanity. It is epistemology that evaluates all human knowledge according to the scientific standard -as more or less perfect, compared with theoretical knowledge.
However, epistemology does not have great pedagogical ambitions -it is more a science for the sake of science, refined intellectualism. While inspired by epistemological ideas, modern didactics bases the rigor of pedagogy on the requirements of demarcation of scientific knowledge from non-scientific, and accordingly -tries to clean pedagogy from all "unscientific" things.
Pedagogy, however, always inevitably goes beyond what is allowed by science: it is impossible to substantiate scientifically the moral principles, but their teaching and instilling is a significant part of the professional task of the teacher. And although pedagogical deontology is still not properly institutionalized in Ukraine, there are only a few Ukrainian publications in this discipline [Sereda 2020;Stelmakh 2019;Shevchenko 2018], however, its availability and demands are beyond doubt. Although education has never been and could not be reduced to the work of professional teachers, both in terms of knowledge and value, pedagogy has always claimed and will claim a leading role in fulfilling this educational mission.
It should even be pointed out that pedagogy in its educational function is in a sense even the antithesis of epistemology. After all, epistemology struggles with what are called meta-narratives -descriptions of descriptions of events. Epistemology is a predominantly positivist discipline -it is based on facts and derives the whole theory from them. We will not dwell on the advantages and disadvantages of substantiating knowledge with facts, but we will briefly note that both the advantages and disadvantages of positivism are related to its rigid attachment to the current state of affairs. This is the reliability, the realism of positivism, but it is in this lies its inability to recognize the possibility of new, previously unknown facts and even militant hostility, systemic suspicion of positivism almost to everything new. Instead, pedagogy has opposite ambitions -to transform the world, even to re-create it anew. Pedagogy tries to re-create the world through education: pedagogy is based on the sacred belief that the proper upbringing and education of the new generation will create the basis for such a radical renewal of the world -at least, the human world, including society. That is why for pedagogy there are so important ideals, which positivism quite clearly and justly qualifies as meta-narratives. However, what is a terrible flaw for positivism and positivist epistemology and an inadmissible and unforgivable sin, very this thing is the lever for pedagogy, using which, it achieves its main goal -to create a new personality that will create a new world.

Vocation as the following: searching for a model of education or abandoning it
It is no secret that pedagogy has never performed only the function of translating knowledge and even the translation of values -it has always included the function of providing some training, had a certain disciplinary function. Pedagogy has not always been repressive or even more punitive, but at least in its residual form this disciplinary function is inherent in modern pedagogy, and in the history of pedagogy it has sometimes grown to the role of almost the main function of this science. We should mention Adorno's "Taboo on the Vocation of the Teacher" again, as well as the many later critical works of such thinkers as: Austrian theorist Ivan Ilyich, especially his "Deschooling society" [Illich 2000], Brazilian humanist Paolo Freire ], the work of Michel Foucault ] and other critics of disciplinary practices, such as the study "History of the Body" [Corben et al. 2006]. At the same time, education is quite possible outside of formal educational institutions. Strict disciplinary practices are also possible here -and even stricter than in other public institutions, but the space for freedom in the field of education is incomparably wider and is still used mainly to reduce rather than increase disciplinary pressure.
But often this is a decrease in external disciplinary pressure in order to increase internal pressure -the pressure of conscience, the pressure of vanity, the pressure of the will to own greatness. This is how Friedrich Nietzsche puts it.
"…Any education begins with the opposite of everything that is now glorified under the name of academic freedom -with obedience, with submission, with discipline, with service. And just as great leaders need followers, so do governed people need leaders. Here in the hierarchy of minds is dominated by mutual predetermination, a certain kind of established harmony. The culture that now sits on the throne of modernity wants to oppose this eternal order, to which, according to the natural law of gravity, all things are constantly redirecting themselves, to violate and to destroy it. It wants to humiliate leaders to the role of its mercenaries or bring them to their deaths" [Nietzsche 1954: 262].
Nietzsche demands the renunciation of the right of students to determine their own educational goals and means, instead glorifies the military spirit, idealizes the Burschenschaft -directly calls for a new war, which alone could provide not fictional but real discipline, cleanse life of all superfluous and superficial. German university education of the second half of the nineteenth century, in his opinion, only demotivates students, weans them to learn for real, the whole system of higher education is designed to quench the passion of Burschenschaft, robbers, revolutionaries, instead mystifying their vocation, orienting their actions not to be creators, but to be officials from the field of knowledge. In fact, Nietzsche believes that university education opposes the goals of real learning, instead of directing to them.
Nietzsche may be too romantic about war and militarism, but his critique of the over-relativism of the student worldview sounds today largely like a critique of some of the ideals of postmodernism that have engulfed the minds of much of modern students and professors around the world.
Against this background, modern formal education is no longer looking like an excessive drill, as humanists wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, but on the contrary -as a critical lack of discipline, as a excessive and harmful relativism. Possible analogies with modernity are striking. Instead of firm principles and formed tastes, a university entrant in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany, according to Nietzsche, has a completely relativistic worldview: real philosophy and aesthetics, and hence ethics, he replaces the reduction of all life tasks to the clarifying of their contexts -historical, philological, etc. This leads, Nietzsche is convinced, to the loss of values. The gymnasium teaches to trust impersonal knowledge, and at the university the professor appears not as an authority and a source of discipline of mind and heart, but only as a translator of more complex knowledge than the gymnasium. It is as if the student has to decide for himself what to study and why. Granted at the university itself, the student, according to Nietzsche, turns into a sailboat without a rudder.
"From the heights of the dream of self-knowledge, he again falls into the skepticism of self-irony. He rejects the significance of his struggles, feels the need for any real, even mean usefulness. Now he seeks solace in hurried, restless actions to hide under them from himself. And so his bewilderment and lack of a leader in education leads him from one form of existence to another: doubt, exaltation, vital need, hope, despair, everything throws him here and there, as a sign that all the stars above him, with help of which he could steer his ship, extinguished" [Nietzsche 1954: 257]. We can see that this state literally conveys the French term "discourse", ie loss of course, "yapping", blind search. It would be possible to argue for a long time, but if there is no satisfactory result, if there is a discussion for the sake of discussion, discursive recursion -then such an argument will not have any significant educational or even more pedagogical meaning. Nietzsche argues that the learner needs not so much discussion as a leader who will not let him wander at random, but will indicate firm guidelines [Nietzsche 1954: 256].
But is Nietzsche right when he reduces academic freedom to the freedom of the learner to choose his own content and ways of learning? Is academic freedom really just a student's freedom? Is this independence always harmful? Is academic freedom really the evil that prevents an individual from gaining an inner core? Why does Nietzsche not speak of the freedom of the scientist and professor as an academic freedom?

Academic freedom as the highest goal of education and a model for political independence
Perhaps it is academic freedom that is what educational institutions operate for, if not for the provision of knowledge and not for disciplinary practices. In any case, this is what most university researchers are inclined to do -for example, John Dewey ], Carl Jaspers ], John Searle ], Jürgen Habermas ], Richard Rorty ] and other.
Nietzsche's allegations of academic freedom must be answered. First, Nietzsche implicitly contrasts proper academic freedom (allegedly absent in contemporary for him universities, and therefore fictitious for Nietzsche) with existing academic freedom, which he interprets quite specifically, namely, incorrectly views it as "freedom from" rather than "freedom for". There is clearly a substitution of concepts here: Nietzsche does not mean as an academic freedom what everyone usually understands. Nietzsche sacrificed academic freedom for his critique of university philosophy. In Nietzsche's account, they both -university philosophy and academic freedom -look like a parody of some old-fashioned school: with a school special punisher and tyrants-teachers, something like in Lev Kassil's "Conduit and Schwambrania" [Kassil 2018] or in Ivan Franko's "Gryts' School Science"" [Franko 2017].
"One mouth that speaks, many ears that listen, and half as many hands that write -such is the external academic apparatus, such is the educational machine of the university. In everything else the owner of this mouth is completely separated and independent of the owners of these ears; and this dual independence is proudly praised as academic freedom. In addition, to further expand this freedom, one can say almost everything he wants, others almost listen to what they want. And behind both groups, at a considerable distance, stands a state with the intense countenance of an overseer, to remind us from time to time that it is the goal, the end point, and the meaning of this whole strange procedure of speaking and listening" [Nietzsche 1954: 253]. Here all are "free" from each other, but in the worst sense of freedom -as mutual indifference, disunity, alienation, atomization without hope of formation of any permanent social connections. Without overcoming such individualism and without creating a common educational ideal, true, proper academic freedom is impossible. But Nietzsche cares not so much about clumsy and dim teachers, not so much a utilitarian and repressive state -all this can be overcome by a truly creative young soul -, he is dissatisfied with the apathy and retreatism of students. It is the absence of real fire and burning with truth that Nietzsche accuses his contemporary student of substituting a deadly and insanely fascinating struggle for a new unknown world with daily little "discoveries" of trivialities and toothless "victories" over what is already dead.
Thus, secondly, Nietzsche demands true academic style for two target groups at the same time: students and researchers. Crucifying the university bureaucracy and pseudo-scientific philistines, Nietzsche urges the search for a true academic spirit outside of academic institutions -universities. This sounds paradoxical, as is with much of the cases with Nietzsche, but it is worth separating the rational grain from the chaff of the many not always fair accusations. Nietzsche sees himself as such a youth leader, perhaps willing to acknowledge this ability for some single researchers outside the university -but not for university professors who are immersed in their corporate games. Later, Martin Heidegger, under the guise of a logical conclusion, would absurd Nietzsche's idea when he called on students to blindly and selflessly follow leaders -but also under the slogan of the need to bring academic freedom beyond German universities [Heidegger 1994]. But if Heidegger speaks of service and his speech is imbued with the spirit of collectivism, then Nietzsche has an undeniable spirit of rebellion and individualism. Thus, in our opinion, unlike Heidegger, Nietzsche is not so much against academic freedom as against its imitation and substitution by the officialism. By and large, Nietzsche advocates the spirit of academicism and creativity against academic formalism and literalism.
However, it cannot be said that the university is a priori incapable of being a space for the flourishing of academicism -just at the university, academicism experiences the greatest challenges and risks. It is at the university that it is easiest to betray the academic and general educational vocation under the guidance of performing formal academic functions. But it is the university that has the best institutional means for comprehensive academic support. Thus, the eminent German philosopher of modernity Jürgen Habermas once noted: "…The higher education system performs four functions simultaneously: the main function (a) of research and advancement of young sci-entists goes head to head with (b) preparation for an academic career (and generation of technically applicable knowledge), on the one hand, with (c) tasks of general education and (d) contribution to cultural self-understanding and intellectual enlightenment, on the other hand… Only the fourth function does not have its own institutional carrier; it is accomplished through the intellectual role of professors" [Habermas 1986: 714-715]. Thus, what Nietzsche relied on only professors is, in fact, already more distributed among the formal tasks of educational institutions, as Habermas testifies. Nietzsche's logic was that these institutions in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century worked so poorly that their functions seemed to have to be taken over by sacrificial lone geniuses -at least in relation to the essential tasks of these institutions. The truth of academic freedom and Nietzsche's life truth that agrees with it is that without such brilliant personalities who embody science in its purest form, institutions will turn into bureaucratic organizations in which ritual science-like actions still take place and real science will quickly disappear. Conversely, if universities create comfortable spaces for scientific creativity, if educational institutes work primarily on outstanding academic personalities, rather than on a diploma conveyor belt, then universities will thrive. This is where true academicism comes into play.
It is worth noting that a person can show his/her best academic qualities not in war, but in the audience. Indeed, all truths, and above all the truth of citizenship, are tested by war -this is probably the strictest test. However, academic battles, if they are real, are no less fierce. Adorno, mentioned above, died shortly after a heated discussion with young people, which he himself called for uncompromising acts, and then he himself suffered from this ideology when he became the object of such extreme principles in practice. Yet most academic wars do not have bloody victims: even when students transfer them to the political plane, they rarely come to tragedies [Searle 1973]. However, the loss of belonging to academia can be a tragedy for a person: even if it is not done administratively, a person can feel his/her own weakness and inability to meet high standards. Since the academic sphere has its own honor based on academic virtues and values, it is undoubtedly appropriate to self-purify rather than to suffer the intervention of external oversight bodies -the court of honor has always been spiritually superior to state courts, and spiritual condemnation much more painful and intolerable than any administrative or even criminal punishment, even for death itself. How many worthy people, including from the academic sphere, chose death to avoid shame, or rather to prove their rightness. Socrates and Seneca, Giordano Bruno, Walter Benjamin, perhaps Louis Althusser, and others -there have always been philosophers who did not need a war to test themselves for fear of death. However, without a doubt, to stay alive, you must usually have much more courage than to die. After all, as long as a person lives, he/she is able to influence the situation much more than after his/her death. Only in exceptional situations does death prove to be the strongest and most indispensable philosophical argument.
A professor or a student -but always a brilliant personality, an uncompromising seeker of truth and a virtuoso representative of it -is who is not just a model of academicism, but its priority carrier. But will individuals able to fulfill out the tasks of the whole system of education and science? The question is rhetorical -we need proper educational institutions too. And here it is worth arguing with Nietzsche.
Finally, thirdly, academic freedom lies in the influence of universities on society, and not in the academic space closed from external influences -the first allows the second, but not vice versa [Boychenko 2014]. As Habermas observes, even researches carried out outside of university maintain a close relationship with universities: "Even outside the university, scientific learning processes retain something of their original university form. They all live off the stimulating and productive power of discursive debate, which holds the key to surprising arguments. The door is open, at any moment a new face may appear, a new thought may suddenly arise" [Habermas 1986: 716-717]. Here Habermas writes that in different ways -not only scientific but also political, cultural, through the influence on the formation of traditions -"university learning processes take place not only in exchange with business and administration, but also in the internal connection with the reproductive functions of the life world" [Habermas 1986: 715]. In this regard, Nietzsche's position is fully consistent not only with Habermas, but in general it resonates with the views of philosophers-researchers of the idea of the university, which refers in this Habermas' article -Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schelling, Talkott Parsons, Helmut Shelsky [Habermas 1986]. Academic freedom grows out of itself, and external challenges appear only as formal and somewhat concomitant reasons or even occasions, irritants that stimulate the self-development of academicism.
Thus, academic freedom is the creation of a common, institutionally secure space for the search for truth; prominent researchers and exemplary educators (at best it is the same people) should be the center of gravity and structuring principle of this space; and the whole society should be the area of influence of such creation -if not literally at once, then in a clearly visible and rationally calculated short-term perspective. Academic freedom in itself is not identical with scientific truth or pedagogical success, but it is undoubtedly their necessary basis: without academic freedom, neither science nor education can be developed.

Conclusions. The vocation as a challenge and the calling as a response to challenges
The vocation itself is a challenge for the individual, because it often requires the effort of all forces and the full revealing of one's creative potential. At the same time, it is through the implementation of his/her vocation that the individual receives the resources and abilities giving him/her the strength and ability to respond to numerous external challenges. To get some benefits from job as a vocation it is necessary to find your calling in life -its main, strategic purpose, its intrinsic meaning: our calling gives us goals and our vocation gives us means to achieve these goals.
In our time, when there is left little of values after the postmodern devastating irony and its subtle, but not delicate criticism, in our time, when the status of truth is threatened by the new Dionysianism of meta-modernism, with its reckless cutting of all Gordian knots, tightly imposed around its development by modern civilization, in our time of total post-truth, which mixed all values with their antipodes to their complete indistinguishability, in our time of hybridization of everything with everything from DNA to ideals, in our time of loss of purity and transparency and the loss of the very desire for purity and transparency -it is easier to face a challenge than to find a simple and problem-free situation for humanity and human being. Sometimes it seems that such situations will never happen again. But if you think about it and turn to the works of world classics, you will finally understand that there have never been problem-free situations in the history of mankind -even in the idyllic and mythical Paradise. Problems and challenges are not characteristics of the outside world, they are a way of human life. Therefore, a person cannot live without a calling. The task is not even to find your vocation, but to learn to accept it properly. In fact, this is calling, this is culture, this is civilization. Therefore, when there is a desire to doubt, to doubt the vocation, moreover to doubt in a calling, it is a desire to doubt oneself. It is also quite legal and even useful, as we were once taught by Rene Descartes. However, such doubt is useful only as a preliminary exercise, when it is methodical and honest. It is this doubt that will inevitably lead us to a deeper understanding of our calling. Such doubts, such critical thinking is an important component of our education, a necessary prerequisite for independence: personal, collective, common -independence of the individual and the citizen, independence of the state and sovereignty of the people. Such systematic and total criticism, not as nihilism, but as a component of the systematic search for an authentic vocation and sacred calling, is taught by education, and best of all, by academic education. The sacred here is the truth, the essence of things as they are. And above all human being seeks to know what he/she is. This essence is expressed by the calling -not naked knowledge and not supra-individual values, but an inseparable fusion of knowledge and values in the experience of the existential authenticity of person's existence.