7. John Keating Teaches His Class Everything Except For What They Actually Need To Know
The Movie:Dead Poets SocietyDead Poets Society is a movie about a teacher named John Keating, who comes to a strict prep school in the late 1950s and inspires his students to "seize the day," amongst a bunch of other hammy ideals that are passed off as important life lessons. It's all supposed to be inspiring, and it
is until you realise that Keating - who we're meant to view as the greatest teacher in the history of teachers - is actually terrible at his job. Why? Well, because he doesn't do the one thing he's supposed to be doing: teaching. He just ends up mostly distracting the students. Think about it. Nowhere in the movie does he actually teach them
about poetry. He just reads it to them, and they mistake the act of enjoying it with enjoying their teacher. Everybody in his class finishes the movie (one of whom actually kills himself 'cause he's told to seize the day, courtesy of Mr. Keating, by the way) thinking that poetry is awesome, but they don't know why. They've just been told it is, and associate it with their free spirit of a teacher, who favours self-expression above everything else, despite the fact that it's not his job to enforce that. In fact, "seizing the day" has no real place in the school environment, to be perfectly honest. The students are there to actually learn stuff, so that in the future they then have the
opportunity to seize the day. Keating just avoids what's really important, which is to genuinely teach them about the craft and structure of poetry, so they can decide for themselves why it's great. The kids in the movie end up just shouting random lines of poetry because they like that their teacher is going against the system. But he isn't a life-coach. He just really sucks.