Better Men Than We Anon
by John Coleman
The is part three, and the final section, of an essay originally published by The Postil in June 2025 as
“A Fight To The Knife.” JC
Of Slaves & Saints
We in alt ed are not a serious bunch. That alternative educational communities cannot see the inherent contradiction of their ideals and their middle-class values is all I need to prove this. We so-knowledgeable grown ups are damaged by our schooling, and though we see incidental problems, the psychological dependence our pretended masters massaged us into is a tough thing to root out. Only the gods and saints of the past can get us out of this rut.
To be a slave is one thing; it is another matter entirely to want to be a slave. Robbed of his religion, his ethnos, and his pride, the modernly-educated are fit for nothing else, and – astaghfirullah! – nothing else they wish to be. This is the greysome legacy of Rockefeller education, as soon seen in public school as in private and home versions of the same.
Power Of Archetypes
In all this, what is to be the praxis of educational leadership? Vision, discipline, and execution are our watchwords, and these chiefly along the lines of the mythic, the heroic. These things stir in the breast of men from all times and climes, and if liquor and porno and trauma and carefully engineered discouragement have stunted these three things in people, they will never kill them in people. Our pretended masters know this, for the energies of many thousands of turncoats, those sadsome Svengalis of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, is given over to co-opting this very thing. They know the power of archetypes, and they do what they can to divert those energies onto some Disney Channel or superhero reservation.
Archetypes are powerful and intimate; they are, in fact, powerful precisely for their intimacy. As Rockefeller schools – public, private, or home, it’s all the same – exist precisely to castrate men and societies of men of their power, their agency; and as this same cruel system wars against genuine social intimacy, placing in succession before a youth an endless carousel of learn’d strangers – I say these archetypes are exactly what the doctor ordered.
Pagan, Christian, or Jew, the energy of these tales have fueled empires to the heights of greatness; the profundity of archetypes explains the charming and easy acceptance of the Christian saints by a population otherwise secular. I have known skeptical casts refuse to remove yard statues of the Virgin, and birdies have told me that Muslims and Baptists have thrown up prayers to St. Anthony the each time they misplace their bottle of Scotch.
Heroic archetypes pagan and Christian are so readily received because they are deeply rooted in the deepest aspects of our humanity. The stamina needed to snatch formal learning from the jaws of Zoomification and naked credentialism, from the chemically-dulled mind of the general population to whom we mean to minister, can only come from holy examples and archetypes.
We need teachers of this heroic cast and mien, they of vision and discipline and execution. Teachers are a painfully idealistic lot, at least at the start. Too often the souls of educationalist either burn out and move on, or they become chinless automatons. Educational Leaders need to foster professional environments which neither suffocate nor constrict the generous sorts who so often are done dirty in Rockefeller education, public, private, and home.
Something Altogether Different
It is wholly pointless for these heroic instructors to carry on in the present combinations. It is a fool’s errand to tarry there, and I the fool have done it long enough b’times to know it so. All have sold the pass, all want municeps where there once were men, all have run up the white flag to middle-class respectability. Let them be, they’re with O’Leary in the grave. There must be a striking out into something altogether different from the mainstream, and from what flatters itself as an alternative.
And what is to be this striking out? It is to have courage enough to roar not only at the errors of the mainstream schools, but to point out the flaws of the pretended alternatives; it is to have humility enough to not throw the educational baby out with the bathwater, to maintain and implement those aspects of mainstream education which are salubrious. The striking out of the actual teacher and student is to burn every bridge and despoil every good in each and all modality of education, public, private, Waldorf, Mason, Montessori, home-, un-, nature-, Classical schooling, etc., etc.
The trick in all this, you see, is to maintain vision, discipline, and maturity enough that this approach not collapse into a gobbledegook of sentiments without execution, the whole sad fate of the conservative and alt spectrums.
It is far too small a thing to let our critique and our salve fester in conferences and at kitchen tables. This insular spirit shows a lack of will and vision; it shows a lack of piety. Piety is a truly distorted word in our day. Properly understood, piety means moral and religious observance for the common, for the individual’s, good. It is this will and vision to enrich the common good which we who pretend towards betterment are lacking.
Earlier I used the expression, “mindless obedience.” This is a bad thing so long as it is mindless; obedience in se, however, is not a bad thing. In too many circles this distinction is not made, and that is why those circles are completely irrelevant no matter their fuss and feathers. To whom are teachers obedient? To our sciences, to our colleagues, to our students, to our neighborhood.
Call It Compassion
And here we run full-stop into a collision between rhetoric and reality. If skins are not daunted by the task at hand, many falter at this critical stage; here manys the promising work has buckled. You see, the temporary yielding of ideals to practical contingencies is like to strike the idealistic soul as a compromise. Don’t call this route compromise, for to compromise on principles is a genuine delict. Call it compassion and you’ll be closer to the mark.
There is a maturity problem at this hour. One place where this is evident are in reformist communities like alternative education. Good ideas are worth squat without the discipline, obedience, and the cotidian organization which makes schools hum along from day to day.
Steeled With Stories
And here the pagan ideal of the hero must give way to the Christian ideal of the saint; we must be the pagan hero in private, the Christian saint in public, and these two things are not opposed (if they but knew).
Yes, we must personally nurture the intransigence of the pagan gods as daily archetypes. For this the southern gods are too effete. The Rome which gave us the miserable LEGAL system could never offer anything inspiring to the soul. To the north and the east we must turn. We must lash ourselves to the post with Cuchulain, we must mount up with Loci at the Ragnarok, and if Arjuna must kill thirty-three million demons we ought sharpen our swords, that we help him the sooner.
Any man who sallies forth for educational restoration must steel himself with such stories, for the opposition he will receive from his fellow professionals and the general public will be overwhelming without them. These tales are amongst the finest products of the human soul; they have made many a people great when they were followed and sitting ducks for carpetbaggers and strangers when they were forgotten, and if we emulate them we’ll never go wrong.
It wasn’t until the miserable Reformation split the Hellenic-Hebraic marriage that what called itself Christianity, Catholic or protestant though it be, mind you, turned its back on the glories of pagan myth that Western Christianity started on its path of decline and eclipse. In the marriage of the pagan and the Christian, really the Hellenic and the Hebrew, there is a manfulness so seamlessly adopted by the monastics. As a child of the monasteries, schools ought to reclaim this symbiosis.
The Pagan Yields To The Christian
And now the bombastic meets the real; the ideal hits the cotidian. I have lately opened Apocatastasis Institute up to tutoring. While nothing a’tall is changing with the Institute’s other works, still and all, this is a thing which sits most uneasily on my conscience, I whose conscience is sizzled darker than a blackamoor. Everything in me roars against tutoring, I confess, for it strikes me as a compromise. For a decade, you see, I have said this modality exacerbates everything which is curdled in mainstream education, everything which has turned the sacred classroom into the haunt of apparatchiks. Think of tutoring’s commercial ethos, its lack of emotional bonds with the student, its fundamentally bourgeois future-preference, its reduction of education to base data-crunching, in every way this approach is worse than public schooling. No matter the competence of the tutor or the pupil, the deeper DNA of tutoring is what is rotten. I have said this for a decade, muscha, I say it now, and I should say it so long as I’ve breath in me.
But we must make accommodation for the state of society. A decade of this work has convinced me that the public, including those cock-of-the-heaps who mouth a great deal of the social, political, spiritual, and economic points we have spent a decade verbing in the classroom – simply cannot grasp the enormity of the work at hand. Let the Christian take the place of the pagan here; let us accommodate our neighbors so assaulted by fluoride, media, and telephonic waves. We must not scorn their simplicity, and we need all hands on deck anyhow.
Through no fault of the fluoridated public, men simply cannot grasp what we are up to. The work of authentic educational reform digs deeper than any of your religious, political, or economic solutions do; we enrich the culture in a society completely stripped of culture.
Why such a focus? For only when culture is established will any higher works of betterment obtain. It is, in fact, the inability to grasp this dynamic which explains the abject failure of the conservative, patriot, and truth movements, to say nothing of what conventional religion has let itself become amidst this struggle.
Yes, in accounting the general public in this manner, let us take the mind of the priests and missionaries down the ages who kissed the sores of the lepers, of the laymen who died by the bushel in manys the long-forgotten plagued hospital. It is, in fact, only with this spirit of holy condescension that a culture will take root.
So long as the adamantine pagan archetype dominates, educational reform will remain a little thing. Do this long enough and you ferment into a clique, a party; into puritans. It is only with Christian yielding to the brokenness of mankind – in this instance to the functional retardation of our fellows – that we will truly scotch the errors of Rockefeller education and what purports to be alternative education at present.
The End of the Matter
The dead can hear me, and to the dead I speak.
This head is great Cuchulain’s, those other six
Gave him six mortal wounds. This man came first;
Youth lingered though the years ran on, that season
A woman loves the best. Maeve’s latest lover,
This man, had given him the second wound,
He had possessed her once; these were her sons,
Two valiant men that gave the third and fourth;
These other men were men of no account,
They saw that he was weakening and crept in;
One gave him the sixth wound and one the fifth;
Conall avenged him. I arranged the dance.
(W.B. Yeats, “Death Of Cuchulain”)
When the dead arise, when the mythic incarnates, when schools cease being the haunt of mediocrity and become the seminary of culture, there will be fruits to see. Until then there is work at hand for educational leaders.
This essay has been about formal education, its complicity in the murder of a world, and what comes next. If what comes next is to be a wholesome thing, teachers are needed who will blend the best of the pagan and Christian mythos, tempered with tremendous condensation towards a public which is functionally impaired. This is a hard thing down amongst the dead, but your back is not broken and God gave you a body for nothing but to labor.
And as we cinch our very intestines atop a post, that we die upright as Cuchulain; as we load that last bullet for a sprint from the Four Courts, that we show traitors for who they are as did Cathal Brugha (An Irish Republican who single-handedly faced down hundreds of Free States soldiers); as we wind up one last bola blow in that Rhode Island swamp with King Philip (A New England Indian who attempted to unite all the tribes in resistance to the European settlers. Ultimately his formidable confederacy was whittled away by bribery and attrition to just King Philip and a few supporters who made a last stand one autumn’s morning), that the Puritan run back to where he came from, we will smile the smile of the brave, knowing that the mythic incarnates b’times, and that better men than ever we were will soon follow anon.
