The Ghost of Mr. Keating, Revisited

Reflecting on some older ideas...

Image of Robin Williams as John Keating in *Dead Poets Society* (1989)

I recently re-watched the movie Dead Poets Society with a group of friends who have known me virtually my entire life. As we made our way through the movie, they reminded me of things I had once said about the film, views I had once held onto very tightly. In a lot of ways, I credit the movie with sparking some of my passion for teaching, although it was just one of several sources of inspiration on that front.

On the drive home from this reunion weekend, I thought about what my friends had said. The person they were remembering was very idealistic, naive to the difficult work of teaching, ignorant of bureaucracies and politics, but firmly committed to the belief that education can change students’ lives. I still very much believe that, but I now know a lot more about the difficulty of making change in our schools and classrooms, and I felt the tension between those two things as I watched the film.

About a decade ago, I wrote a post for my old blog about Dead Poets Society. I’m sharing it again here, with some revisions to reflect what has changed for me and what has stayed the same. I think it’s an important conversation for those of us in education to revisit from time to time, because the issues are perennial.

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I.  The semester is just beginning at universities all across the country. As classes open and faculty development programs launch, a familiar specter from the hallowed halls of popular culture begins to lurk: the figure of John Keating, the teacher played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society. But it’s not so much the character itself who looms large for us as much as it is the idea of what the character represents. Mr. Keating has become a symbol for the inspiring teacher who changes students’ lives, who makes their lives mean more by having taught them. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but in the process of becoming more of a representative abstraction the idea of Keating has had an effect on our perceptions of teaching.

II.  True Story #1: I have wanted to teach since I was 5 years old. My sister tells a funny story about how I tried to teach her to read when she had reached the advanced age of 3 by giving her one of my Hardy Boys books and a dictionary, telling her that she should look up any words she didn’t know. We didn’t get very far. So it was that my first foray in fostering experiential learning ended in a dismal failure. Undaunted, though, I continued to pursue my goal of teaching.

True Story #2: I was 12 when I saw Dead Poets Society, and it struck me in a profound way. For the first time, I had a framework into which I could place my desire to be a teacher and a language I could use to speak about it. I wanted to inspire students, I would tell people. Inspiration became my goal, and it was a dominant lens through which I viewed teaching.

True Story #3: I went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut.  Shortly after I began my program, I met Sam Pickering, one of the faculty members in the English department. Sam, it turns out, had once taught in a private school in Nashville, and–although he only worked at the school for one year–his teaching greatly influenced a student named Tom Schulman, who would go on to write the screenplay for Dead Poets Society. Schulman has credited Sam with being the model for Mr. Keating.

III.  Given all of this background and my current position as a director of a center for teaching and learning, you might think that I would be a Keating evangelist, spreading the word about inspiration wherever I go, right? I’m not, actually.

I freely, and unabashedly, admit that the film stoked my desires to be a teacher in unquantifiable ways, and I will always be very grateful for that. The idea of helping students to feel valued, to show them they may “contribute a verse,” to quote one of the best scenes of the film, is still central to my philosophy of teaching. But as an instructor myself and as someone who works with faculty and graduate students who do the hard work of teaching in their classroom, labs, and offices, I recognize the difficulties posed by the ghost of Mr. Keating. The potential danger of the Keating figure is that teaching comes to be viewed by students, faculty, parents, and society as something that is about inspiring students rather than helping them to learn. This, of course, is a misguided notion about what happens in the classroom, and it can set an impossible standard for teachers to live up to. In the face of the pressure to change lives, it can become all too easy to feel incompetent, and teaching is hard enough without questioning ourselves at every turn.

Inspiration is wonderful; in fact, I have been inspired by many teachers (both past and present), and I’m sure many of you have been inspired by teachers you have had as well. The trouble is that inspiration cannot be planned, nor can a conscious effort to inspire guarantee that it will happen. Students can be inspired by any manner of things that happen in a classroom, both profound and mundane, but inspiration is always highly individualized.

Many teachers I know work in schools where they don’t have many resources. Some have to buy their own supplies for students. They have to work with prescribed curricula and face enormous pressure to make sure their students achieve certain scores on tests. Many college faculty, too, are underpaid, do not have full-time positions, and are not incentivized to focus on their teaching. These are the kinds of real-life contexts that make even thinking about inspiration difficult, to say nothing of trying to cultivate it.

I am not willing to throw inspiration out the window entirely, though. Instead, I have a compromise. We should focus our efforts on constructing courses, curricula, and environments that foster transformational learning experiences, where students learn deeply through authentic assignments. If we pair this pedagogical approach with empathy, then we are demonstrating respect for students and an understanding that we are teaching human beings, all of whom are on their own journeys through learning and life. If we emphasize these elements, then inspiration may occur.  Even if it does not, we have privileged something that may last longer: learning.

Learning is hard. It is messy. It is a deeply complex process. Learning doesn’t make for good filmmaking, but it is the foundation on which the “extraordinary lives” Keating mentions in the film can be built.

William Pannapacker, writing as Thomas H. Benton, describes the enduring hold (and–to his mind–the damage) the Keating mythos has had on the English majors he advises who wish to go to graduate school in “Goodbye, Mr. Keating.”  Here is where I diverge from Pannapacker, though.  I think it’s great if students are inspired to be teachers and/or academics by Dead Poets Society. We just need to make sure that they go into the field with their eyes open, that this inspiration is eventually complemented by a rigorous study of teaching techniques and that they are supported as they strive to be more effective in the classroom.

In the end, I am aware that this is a lot of weight to place on a fictional character. There are other Keatings out there in popular culture (I’m sure you are already making a mental list of them), so I don’t really mean to single him out as much as what he represents. I think it would be even better if, ultimately, we looked to those teachers on our own campuses who are doing outstanding work in their classrooms every single day as our models. If inspiration is anywhere, I’m pretty sure it’s there.