A proud product of public education, John Coleman received his undergraduate degree in history from Western Connecticut State University. Alas, that was to be the end of his flattering academic titles. Unwilling to once again become a debt slave to usurers, his graduate studies were scotched at the half-way point. John wasted over a decade of his professional life attempting to establish a high school for a community who took neither themselves nor their worldview seriously. Burned by these unseemly experiences, on Holy Saturday of 2013 Apocatastasis Institute was founded.
The Institute primarily exists to protect the humanities in se, and to provide a haven for academics in a disintegrating professional field. The author of Hurt: Some Thoughts On Disillusion, Distrust, and Disorientation These Last Few Years (2015), The Trotsky Train: Some Words To The Discupulate (2018), An Excess Of Love (2024), and Pearls Before Swine (2024), John daily continues his work of restoring formal classroom learning in light of the proper personal, social, and political ends of a school.
In 2025 John won the Excellence In Education award from the Education 2.0 conference organization.
I first got to know John a few years ago, when I studied Latin under his excellent tutelage at Apocatastasis. I interviewed him for the podcast back in November, 2022: Agency, Vision and Discipline.
John and I intended to focus this conversation on health and the connections between health and education, but we ended up having a much broader discussion, exploring questions like: What makes a healthy society? What’s the role of education in reforming society? And how does a conditioned lack of agency impede that reform?
We talked about:
Formal education as the last coming-of-age ritual we all share in common – and how and why John believes that ritual is coming to an end;
The role of AI in future education – and what John sees as a positive outcome of that trend;
How commerce has taken over education and turned teachers into “service sector workers” vs. the role that teachers have historically played;
Formal education as a fulcrum for social reform – and what kind of education would contribute to a healthy society;
How modern pedagogy saps the agency of both students and teachers – and lack of agency as a fundamental social problem;
And much more!
In the conversation, John mentions an article by Ted Gioia: What’s Happening to Students?
Find out about John’s work:
main site: www.ApocatastasisInstitute.wordpress.com
coming up in July: Health Conference
Contact John: apocatastasisinstitute@aol.com
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