There are a number of reasons for the current teacher crisis in America, including the stress on education from the pandemic, low competitive salaries, poor working conditions, conflicts within the school community, and the deteriorating respect for teachers in our communities. All of these disempower teachers. Teachers earn respect and authority not by meeting the expectations of standardization, but because their entire personality is dedicated to the purpose of educating children. Respect and authority are earned, first, from one’s students in the autonomy of one’s classroom. There, the teacher is the master of the educational environment, giving voice, through his or her personality and character to the lessons that teach the child self-knowledge, trust in oneself, the strength of one’s convictions and the courage to see them through, and the knowledge that we are all part of one humanity.

These big lessons are not part of a standardized curriculum. They will not be tested, though they are tested every day. They come from the empathetic relationships that teachers develop with their students. They are relationships that transcend the role-playing relationship of teachers and students in the classroom by making inter-human connections at the imaginative and sensate levels of consciousness more characteristic of the child and adolescent personality. Throughout my teaching career, I have equated this relationship at the level of consciousness of the soul and not the consciousness of the mind. So, the vocation, or calling, of the teacher is to both inspire the minds and intellects, and to nurture the character of the souls of his and her students.

This consciousness of the soul has an imagistic nature that sees the classic, cultural models of perfection, rarely achieved but always present in the form of the spiritual archetypes that stand behind the character of the personality, as an ideal that resides within. For example, the archetype of the child can be found in the image of the “divine child” in many cultures. In the adolescent, the imagistic nature in the soul is that of the heroic archetype. It manifests in the adolescent’s personality as the same archetypal images found as avatars in video games – the princess, angel, warrior, prince, etc. along with their dark sides. These archetypes in the child and adolescent are vulnerable and can be wounded and fall into darkness, as evidenced by the current mental health crisis among young people. The archetype of the teacher is an ideal that dwells in the imagistic nature of the soul and expresses itself in the personality and character of the teacher to nurture the souls of those young people, lifting them out of the darkness and encouraging the archetype to express itself in personality and character.

Seeking the vocational archetype is not a new idea. Medieval craft guilds – carpenters, stone masons, etc. – had their own vocational archetypes, often in the form of religious or mythological icons that inspired the virtuous characteristics of the personality. For example, Noah, Joseph, and Jesus, were vocational archetypes of the Carpenters Guild, in London. The guilds all maintained their own mysteries and rituals that provided the means by which the apprentices and the adepts could connect with the archetype in the soul and become Masters of their vocation.

In the Modern Age we have lost touch with this imagistic archetypal essence in the soul that calls us to our vocation. In the modern world we are not called by the mystery rituals of our guild, but we must seek the vocational archetype within the imagistic nature of our own soul, on our own, through trial and error.

Personal relationships with students in our classrooms are fundamental to that process. The other part defends a classroom philosophy that balances the education of the mind with the nurture of the soul. With that conviction, the voice of the teacher archetype is evoked and empowered with students, their parents, and the education bureaucracy.

Autonomy in the classroom is where the archetype of the teacher is empowered by its relationship with the students. Autonomy in the classroom is not an easy concession for many school districts to make. It must be built on trust and respect among the teacher cadre, administrators, and parents. The vocational archetype of the teacher is an empowering presence in the school community, inspiring, encouraging, and giving voice to the teaching cadre, so they can maintain the balance between teaching the minds and nurturing the souls of their students, and our future citizens. 

Robert Mitchell