English Class as It’s Meant to Be
by Andrew Collins
My high school English class was a waste of time at best — destructive to the human spirit at worst. I suspect I am not alone.
These classes foist brilliant literature on kids before they’ve grown mature enough to enjoy it, and it turns them off to the joys of great writing for the rest of their lives.
Yet some still dream of another path.
The classic great-teacher drama Dead Poets Society (1989) shows us English class as it ought to be — the kind of class I fell in love with all too late, while taking a college course on existentialism, and that makes me wish I could go back through school to study literature again, study it more, and study it better.
To this I suppose the film’s hero, beloved teacher John Keating, would say, “Well go back to school then!”
Perhaps I should, but I digress.
Dead Poets takes us to the austere environs of an elite Vermont prep school in 1959, where we find the time-honored values of Welton Academy – honor, tradition, discipline, excellence (and by extension conformity) – pitted against our teacher/hero’s pre-60s zeal for individualism and the artistic impulse, as epitomized by Walt Whitman. The rift starts not-so-subtly in Keating’s first English lecture, as he tells his students to tear out the entire ‘Introduction to Poetry’ section of their textbooks and thus eschew a concrete formula for evaluating poetry. Other methods of his include marching out of time with each other and standing on desks – just to see the world a bit differently. In short order, Keating’s unorthodox methods grab the hearts of his pupils. He calls them to confront life in all its fullness rather than live as drones of the academy or the cold halls of their chosen professions.
As the story unfolds, Keating’s students (including Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard in youthful performances) discover that their teacher also attended Welton, and helped found the ‘Dead Poets Society,’ a group of boys who would gather late at night in a cave off campus to serve the motto “carpe diem” – that age-old call to seize the day. “Spirits soared, women swooned, and gods were created,” Keating tells them wistfully.
After hearing this, the boys decide to resurrect a ‘Dead Poets Society’ of their own. Given its makeup of teenage boys, the gathering has a healthy dose of the taboo and the naïve – from cigars and centerfolds to face paint and howling at the moon. Beneath the frivolity, however, dwell the seeds from which great men are made. This society, with its desperate camaraderie and heartfelt expression, conjures reflections of the Inklings in Oxford, or of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the expat community of interwar France.
I make these references to literary greats because Dead Poets taps into something deeper than the typical coming-of-age flick — and something darker.
When Keating’s most impressionable student, Neil (Robert Sean Leonard), commits suicide, Dead Poets Society steps away from the happy, sentimental conclusion of “I got the girl” (or in Neil’s case: “I got the part in the play and reformed my parents”) and becomes a serious film.
Keating’s lectures go awry in the hands of Neil and the other boys, in large part because art isn’t safe. Poetry is fire – hot, vibrant, and alive. It can drive a man into tragic shortsightedness and foolishness. It can throw him off kilter if he embraces “carpe diem” in a vacuum without considering that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. Keating suggests as much to Neil when the young man comes seeking advice for dealing with his restrictive parents. But the boy’s passions soon drive him beyond the reach of teacherly reason.
In Neil’s tragic naiveté, along with attempts by the other boys to apply carpe diem, the film shows both strength and weakness. Neil shows us — and his grief-stricken chums — the danger of rash impulsiveness. But, aside from Keating himself, the film lacks compelling examples of his lessons applied in real life. Just how does one “seize the day,” exactly? I doubt it means caressing your high school crush at a house party as she sleeps in a possibly drunken stupor.
The impulse toward angst and the desire for meaning and purpose deserve more reflection. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. That holds true for the poor ignoramus as well as the privileged – even the wicked smart – who mindlessly conform to the well-worn paths of the Ivy League. What does it profit a man to gain a business, or medical practice, or political office if he neglects the matters of the soul? What good does it do him if he spends his life laboring and twisting to fit into the patterns of society while neglecting to live as an individual?
Or how about we frame the questions in light of our lives today, where the proliferation of technology has birthed a constant interconnectedness? What does it profit a man to gain followers and friends and capture every moment of his life if he does not delight in the things themselves? What good does it do to put up a happy facade of oneself and experience relationships through screens and speakers when flesh and blood move all around us?
This film — and literature in general — may not have a clean answer to these questions, but at least it stirs them within us. To be well and thoughtful people, we need such stirrings — no less now than in 1989, or 1959 for that matter.
And I can’t imagine it would hurt to read more poetry, stand on our desks, or stay up late in a cave to paint our faces and sing songs once in a while.
