MOST OF US ARE CONCERNED about the state of education in this country and the discussions usually hinge on how to pay for it, and whether what we pay for is adequate. So I'd like to turn the discussion in a slightly different direction and ask that we look at education in a new way - through the eyes of literature. There we see education as something other than grades and certifications.

Great literature throughout the ages has always been concerned with the way characters learn or fail to learn about their situations. The goal of this type of education is always wisdom, rather than only about the acquisition of knowledge. Of course, we can't divorce the two; the more facts one knows the better one can use them later, if one has been taught how to think. To make this point all the literature for the past 3500 years has been based on the characters moving through six archetypal levels of awareness in which they learn facts but also how to use those facts.

It should come as no surprise that the same six archetypes that have served as milestones in personal development are echoed elsewhere in other learning contexts. Perhaps the only surprise is how close those echoes are in the world of education - although educators seem much more interested in talking about skills and examinations. What is remarkable is that in any situation of real learning, rather than just of memorization, the six archetypes of Innocent, Orphan, Pilgrim, Warrior-Lover, Monarch and Magician are replicated exactly, and always in the same order. As in literature, so it is in learning.

In literature the archetypes function in a fairly straightforward way. The main character almost always starts as an Innocent who receives a call to action. This makes it necessary to leave home territory or to break with convention and go on a quest of some sort - and become an Orphan. Of course, the Orphan archetype wants to be re-adopted back into the usual ways of doing things as soon as possible, but in that case we don't have much of a story.

Let's take the example, here, of something we all know: the murder mystery story. In most detective stories there is often an unusual aspect to the case that means it cannot be treated as 'routine' by the investigator. This detective, who at this point is an Orphan figure, can always refuse this call to action, but if he or she remains true to this call to find out what really happened then the character becomes a Pilgrim, looking for truth. This is a pattern that exists in almost every murder-mystery story from Oedipus Rex to Prime Suspect.

Let's look at this in more detail. The detective is moved from a place of comfort and order by the fact of the murder, and usually finds that the investigations are met with suspicion or resistance. So here we can see that the Innocent has suddenly become an outsider, the Orphan. When the detective decides to keep investigating anyway, despite what anyone says, then he or she becomes a Pilgrim in the search for truth, rejecting others' prejudices and easy answers.

As the plot unfolds at a certain point it becomes necessary to struggle against opposition of a stronger sort in every detective novel - perhaps head office wants the investigation called off or some of the suspects have powerful friends - and the detective then has to decide to fight for the truth that he or she knows exists no matter what the personal cost might be. This is when the Warrior-Lover archetype comes in to play.

This peaceful warrior begins to gain mastery of the facts of the case, which leads to him trusting some people and not others, whereupon they begin to cooperate. They lead him to make new discoveries, and become more than just passive suppliers of information. Often they become active participants in solving the crime when they decide to say what they know - giving the detective a vote of confidence in a process they, as participants in the suitation, had felt was hopeless. At this point the detective is moving towards the Monarch archetype, enlisting others in the process rather than doing everything himself.

When others are engaged in this action they discover they have more courage and insight than they had believed until that point - otherwise they'd not have remained silent and afraid. They become empowered, they let out long-suppressed information, and this in turn allows the mystery to be resolved by the almost magical capacity of human beings to do the right thing when they feel moved to. This is the stage of the story when some characters stop being cowardly and reclaim what they know about the situation and about themselves. At this point the detective is in touch with the Magician as an archetypal stage, and is at the point where things seem to solve themselves.

So how does this template - which exists in over 3500 years of our finest literature as well as in many rather ordinary detective stories - play out in education?

If we allow ourselves to see education as a process that moves the learner from a state of ignorance to a place of mastery we can see that these stages apply extremely well both in terms of the learner's life-long movement towards wisdom and in terms of any student's trajectory towards competence in a course of study. In contrast to this I think we can all identify with learning that does not go through the six stages we've outlined here. For many of us this will be most easily understood by recalling topics we didn't do well in. Unfortunately in that regard languages seem to be a strong candidate for most of us. We all know of the student who studied German or French or Latin for five years, just scraped through the exam, and promptly forgot everything. Such learners - and we all have areas where we are like this - have not engaged with the subject successfully, and consequently have never seen anything beyond the immediate topic, let alone anything that could fascinate them. So French became simply learning whatever it was the teacher demanded for the test, for example, and was not accompanied by any insights into how a culture can be different from our own, for instance. Yet we all know of other cases where a student loved the language sufficiently for it to become a life-altering experience. So what makes the difference?

Let's look at it this way: when a learner first takes up a subject of study, whether it's knitting or Sanskrit, she doesn't know what it may involve. She just knows she'd like to give it a try, or perhaps is forced to do so because that's what the curriculum demands. She is an Innocent, asking for direction, trusting, deferential to the knowledge of the experts. Once the basics have been covered this person is likely to want to do whatever it is that others agree is a recognizable goal. This involves buying into a certain orthodoxy. So, continuing our example, the student knits a scarf, and he gets praised. Another student takes an exam and gets a qualification in Sanskrit, and this is seen as good also. This is the realm of the Orphan - the one who works to get approval in a recognized way. And it is an essential aspect of learning. If one cannot master the basic skills then learning can't get very far. Unfortunately many of those educators who wish to 'teach to the test' may impart useful skills that can be measured, but they may also disregard those learners who are aiming higher. What if the young student of knitting wants to use the skill in an entirely new way that sounds bizarre? What if he wants to use the science of knitting in order to develop a new type of fishing net, for example? The teacher might become annoyed that the student is learning for his own needs, rather than in order to pass the exam.

To persevere as a learner at this point involves becoming a loner, a Pilgrim, and it takes courage. Pioneers everywhere have had to take this route, and have suffered rejection as a result. The Pilgrim student is likely to be one of the most troublesome, because he's going to be the one who asks odd and unusual questions that the educator perhaps has not considered before. Perhaps the interest in knitting grows into a desire to explore the archaeological significance of textile use or something similar. Perhaps the student of Sanskrit wants to uncover the connections between shapes of letters and vocalized sound, and doesn't care much for grammar, for example. A different example might be the student of art. Some artists are contented to produce pictures which are instantly recognizable as good renditions of the visible world, in which case they are praised by that standard, and may choose to stay in that place of Orphan acceptance. But what of the student who decides to move away from realism? Every great artistic movement from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism has been criticized for not being 'realistic' - when the aim was to express something beyond the faithful rendition of the visual world. Each of these artistic movements was created by artists who were prepared to become Pilgrims and take the risks of rejection. Some of them failed. Yet the world is richer for having Monet, Picasso, Kandinsky and others like them.

To stay on the pilgrim's course any student will have to take on the challenge and declare that she wants to study this chosen topic, whatever it may be, because that's where the deepest and most vital interest lies. This is the Warrior-Lover archetype emerging. Her parents might want her to be a lawyer or an accountant, but she sticks to her guns and takes another course in Sanskrit despite the opposition. In addition, to explore her subject she will willingly put up with all sorts of work that is not always of primary interest. She will grit her teeth and do it anyway. And when this happens successfully she is well on the way to achieving real mastery of the subject area and being a Monarch.

Notice that, like any Monarch running a kingdom, she doesn't have to know everything. She just has to know how to use the information that exists, how to select the best available sources, and who to trust. This type of mastery of the material results, if one is lucky, with the learner being able to make new connections across disciplines. At this point there is a distinction between possessing extensive knowledge and being in command of this knowledge so it can be used with wisdom. So our Sanskrit scholar may well discover something astonishing about language, and the challenge is to be able to use that discovery so that the everyday lives of ordinary people are enhanced in some way. An example of this might be that our scholar can show us that the ancient language can reveal to us some psychological truths about how we form our impressions of the world around us, and that this knowledge helps us understand ourselves better. Or, if we return to our knitting scholar, he may find out that the fishing net he'd so long pondered is now capable of capturing fish but also of allowing dolphins, seals, and whales to go free. He could not have reached that point without learning the basics of knitting, but if he'd only stayed at that level no amount of scarves or sweaters would have helped to save the oceans' wildlife from destruction. At this point the learners have turned their experiences into something else, something greater, and they have become Magician archetypes.

In my experience of thirty years of teaching I can safely say that I've seen the six archetypal stages of learning appear regularly and very often. Of course, not everyone achieves all six stages in everything. Not everyone becomes a first rate inventor or discoverer. For some people the subject being learned is secondary to the life that they can live as a result of that increased awareness. The prisoner who loves his bible may never become a biblical scholar, yet his studying may have turned his life around so that it can become productive, meaningful, and social in ways that had not been available to him before. He may have been able to use his mistakes to become a mentor to others, and prevent them from making the false steps he did.

And this brings us to an important point. Many people can achieve impressive mastery of material in one aspect of their lives and yet be completely undeveloped in other aspects. The man who is a titan of business but has no friends and goes home to a fragmented family is, one might say, a monarch of money but a lost orphan in the personal and emotional world.

This is a cliché of our times, and seems to indicate a short-fall in education in some way. Part of the difficulty with present day education is that those who fund it - the government, for the most part, and paying parents - want results they can measure. Governments want to know that a certain amount of money used a specific way will turn out a pre-determined number of people with appropriate qualifications. If more doctors are needed they want to be sure they can get them, and at a price they can predict (and afford).

Parents are no different. They want to know that they can give their children a meaningful start in life, and will sacrifice in order to do so. This almost always is seen as training the next generation to get a decent job.

There is nothing wrong with this approach, and there is certainly nothing wrong with demanding that specific standards will have to be met. I want all my doctors to be well trained, thank you very much, and to have passed well-devised and demanding exams before they start working on me or anyone else. Yet it is possible for a doctor to be the most accomplished person in her field and yet still never have an original thought in her head throughout her life. She may be a magician in the surgery, inspiring others to achieve more than they thought they ever could, but what about the rest of her life? In this case one might argue that this surgeon is highly instructed but not, as it happens, fully educated. It's not that she can't become a fully developed person, it is just that our education system does not as yet focus on the whole of the human being. We have learned to value technical competence highly and consequently to devalue personal awareness.

The six archetypal levels of awareness, therefore, are not just ways of measuring intellectual growth, although they are certainly useful in that way. They may also be ways of seeing that we do not, at present, invest sufficiently in educating the whole learner, since we prefer to emphasize technical competence and ignore the other aspects of life.

The concept of the six archetypes, then, can be seen to be part of how we grow and how we learn at the very highest levels, yet it is not a schema that is as yet acknowledged despite nearly four millennia of great literature urging us to pay attention to how we develop. Perhaps the time has come to pay attention to the wisdom of the ages.

© Dr. Allan Hunter, 2009

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Allan Hunter was educated at St John’s College Oxford and is presently a professor of Literature at Curry College, Milton, Massachusetts, and a therapist. His two books on archetypes are Stories We Need to Know and The Six Archetypes of Love, both from Findhorn Press.

Visit www.allanhunter.net or www.sixarchetypes.com to find out more.