Dead Poets Society continues to expose our deepest needs
In a recent X thread, Notre Dame professor Timothy P. O’Malley captured my own take on college students: “The reality is that so many students really do view higher education primarily in the mode of credentialing. They don’t love reading. And many don’t love study itself. They feel their whole lives have been ‘measured’ by tests.”
I once asked my students at a previous institution, How many of you feel deeply when you encounter art? How many of you have been overwhelmed by a poem, or enraptured by a painting in a museum? How many of you seek out art, read poetry, go to museums, read fiction? The bulk of the class looked at me as if I had sprouted a second head. If asked to concisely explain the mood of many undergraduate students, emotionally dull would be my response.
It is this mood against which professors labor as they seek to foster love for their disciplines in their students. Counteracting this mood requires us to enliven parts of the soul that for many students have long been stunted and atrophied.
For this reason, I react more positively to the film Dead Poets Society than do many of my intellectual fellows. For them, Keating (played by Robin Williams) is an arch expressive individualist. Arriving at Welton Academy, a school full of Latin and formality and hollow Episcopalian liturgical motions, Keating is viewed by contemporary–often conservative–critics of the film as a squishy romantic, a corrupter of youth, and a relativist to boot. Likewise, his in-film opponents, the other professors at the school and the pragmatic parents of his students, want their students to be prepared for college and careers. Keating wants them to waste time kicking footballs and reciting poetry. Preposterous.
I read Dead Poets Society fundamentally differently from its present-day critics, and I understand Keating’s educational program differently from his fictional rivals as well. The education presented in Dead Poets Society before Keating arrives is not classical, and it is not liberal. It is vocational in the strictest sense, with only a veneer of the classics to keep it alive. The school exists to make boys into businessmen, members of the professional class, not whole human beings. The academy the boys attend represents the purest form of the mode of education that dominates student consciousness today: Welton is a place for credentialing, for providing students with the sort of background on paper that will land them in an Ivy League university, law school, and then a career. What they learn, who they become along the way, is immaterial. The diploma is what counts.
But Keating breathes life into the school and the boys who sit under his tutelage. He rejects not the traditions of his alma mater but the burying of those traditions—not the tradition but the mechanical approach to the tradition that hides its loveliness. His colleagues are not traditionalists, they are modernists who managed to keep Latin courses in the catalog. None shows any interest in teaching students what any of their academic disciplines or future professions are for, because none seem interested in the whole person.
It is undoubtedly true that Keating hopes to inculcate an aggressive individualism, predicated on narrow selections from American transcendentalist poets. But Keating’s excess here is nearer to Aristotle’s virtuous mean, over against the soulless, passionless, deficient education that permeates the fictional Welton Academy. The students in the film (and many students today) require awakening to something their current mode of education leaves dormant.
In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis proposes a useful view of education. Criticizing the authors of an English textbook that engages in haphazard squashing of sentimentalism, Lewis contends that the passionate part of the soul must be exercised and enlivened in the education of the whole person. Misguided debunkers “see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda . . . and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”
In ignoring or even actively opposing the passions, our system of education atrophies an important part of the soul, leaving a world full of “men without chests.” A quality education in the real world will not look precisely like what Robin Williams portrays in Dead Poets Society. I am also certain that Keating would not fully agree with Lewis, though I expect he would wholeheartedly concur that there are beautiful things in the world that demand an emotional response. I am equally certain that a real education will look quite different in form and content from the Welton education that existed before Keating entered the scene.
In the battle between lifeless Latinists and an English teacher irrigating deserts devoid of sentiment, I side with Keating. As an educator myself, I would rather my classroom be filled with a dozen acolytes of Keating than a dozen acolytes of his opponents. At least then I might see some passion, some substance, a foundation for building up. As it stands, I worry that professors today have classrooms filled with passive recipients, whose only goal is maximizing credentials for a minimum of effort, who cannot imagine welling up with tears at a profound poem or a passage of prose.
This is not a fatalistic observation. The wonderful thing about the passions is that they can be cultivated. We can learn to love, to love what we ought, and to love in the right way. This, Lewis says, is the traditional view of what an education is for. Faced with students who possess atrophied chests, we must guide them not just toward knowledge but into a love of it. In learning to do so, I think we would do well not to prematurely dismiss our romantic allies in fact or fiction before we learn what they have to teach us.
Philip D. Bunn is an assistant professor of political science at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. His research has been published in Political Research Quarterly and American Political Thought, and his reviews and essays have appeared in The Review of Politics, Plough Quarterly, Current, and The University Bookman, among other publications.