Alternative title: Okay, I see you up there on those desks. If I hadn’t reached the age when you fall, you can’t get up, I’d get up there too.
The second wave of our country’s classy and touching tribute to Robin Williams has been standing on desks to show allegiance to “captain, my captain.” Jimmy Fallon did it well last night, and such displays are all over YouTube now.
Given what I said about The Dead Poets Society yesterday, you might think I think that America had taken a wrong turn. But that’s not true. I was surely wrong (not to mention unclassy) when I highlighted the limits of the movie yesterday. For one thing, I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail, Facebooking, and threading that comes just short of hate mail on this, and I blog out of vanity, not to feel the hate. For another, the criticisms found in said mail actually make sense. I’m standing by what I said yesterday, but I’m giving the strong case in the other direction today.
I’m told I don’t understand how repressively conformist elite prep schools are, because I’ve haven’t “been there.” True enough. And I’m certainly happy that rich guys have largely abandoned the custom of sending their young sons (and daughters) away to high school. From the movies, novels, and other forms of hearsay, I’ve always thought that boarding high schools are pretty creepy, and I’m not even talking here about the tales we get from the English public schools.
When the RW character tells those boys that lawyers and engineers are necessary for sustaining life, but poetry and love are what makes life worth living, he’s telling those boys what they long to hear. Don’t I always say that the great challenge today is subordinating the technocratic “how” to a humanly worthy “why”? Well, I do. There’s a lot more to the ”why” than the romantic vision of this captain. But, hey, he’s teaching poetry, and his is an inspirational first step.
And who couldn’t cheer when the captain commands the boys to tear out the introductory material to their textbook otherwise filled with real poetry? That Dr. Pritchard wanted to reduce the appreciation of poetry to a kind of quantitative assessment based on a ridiculously reductionist rubric. Any teacher who declares war on that — and, by implication, on all specialists without spirit and on digitalization of the humanities and so forth — really is about opening the boys to a kind of “lifelong learning” that all we poets should believe in. God bless all teachers who are bold (or un-careerist) enough to take such a dissident stand, especially in front of students.
And the phrase “dead poets” is to be praised on many levels. First, there’s the connection of poetry to immortality or transcending the confines of biological being (as described by Mr. Darwin). Second, the poets are mostly not only dead but white and male. Poets are celebrated for how they continue to move erotically beings who are both “inward” and relational today, and not for their political correctness or immediate relevance. Third, it’s easy to move from dead poets to dead philosophers and theologians. Fourth, the poets of the past were better at celebrating gods and heroes, saints and sinners, lovers and warriors, all the polymorphous displays of great individuality. Fifth, reading dead poets turns out to be evidence of truth of the academic platitude that most real learning takes place outside the classroom. The boys secretly go outside to read poetry aloud to share the sheer joy of words that correspond to the truth about who we are. They really have a society. I could go on, and it goes without saying I’m reaching here and there.
A particularly anal teacher or administrator might criticize the captain’s “teaching method” for being short on measurable learning outcomes. And it will inevitably lead to grade inflation. That’s my awkward transition to letting you know about this article I wrote on grade inflation and the Ivy League. I’m trying to think about every criticism of liberal-arts colleges around, and grade inflation, for me, is one of the least interesting.