Elizabeth Grace Matthew makes the case against Dead Poets Society:
Still, as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers (especially teenage boys) knows, their primary limitation is not an inability to seize the day; it is an inability to plan for the future. Indeed, teens’ impulsivity and recklessness is best met with exactly the kind of regimentation, order and authority that Welton as a whole was attempting to provide.
This is the same kind of regimentation, order and authority with which adults of every race, religion and class engaged with teenagers until the 1960s. And, of course, it sometimes had its excesses. Any claim to mathematically measure the “greatness” of poems is self-evidently asinine. More important, a father’s attempt to make significant life decisions for his healthy and self-aware teenage son, without his input, was bound to be counterproductive in every possible way.
But these excesses of the 1950s educational order, as depicted in “Dead Poets Society,” are made-up exceptions that prove the overwhelming rule: Healthy teens need order if they are to court and create developmentally healthy disorder. Being without boundaries to push and structures to push against leads to exactly the type of solipsistic, faux introspection that gives rise to the existential angst for which teens have been known ever since we accepted as a cultural rule that, in the words of Bob Dylan, “mothers and fathers throughout the land” should not “criticize what you can’t understand.”
But, of course, mothers and fathers can understand just fine. The only thing more anti-intellectual than some self-important college professor presuming to quantify the greatness of Shakespeare is some self-important English teacher presuming to teach impressionable boys to think for themselves by using them to unquestioningly validate his own credulous and oversimplified relationship to romantic verse. Keating demanded, remember, that his students rip out “Understanding Poetry” by the fictional foil, Pritchard—not that they develop arguments for refuting it or, forbid the thought, for agreeing with it. Keating does not want the boys to think for themselves—not really. He does not want them to think at all, in fact. He wants them to feel as he does.
When Keating is confronted by Welton’s headmaster, Mr. Nolan, and questioned about his unorthodox teaching methods, he replies that he “always thought the idea of educating was to learn to think for yourself.” What Nolan says in response includes what are meant to be the most villainous and regressive lines of the film: “At these boys’ ages! Not on your life. Tradition, John. Discipline. Prepare them for college, and the rest will take care of itself.”
All reductions to absurdity and excesses notwithstanding, the fictional Nolan has it right.
David Starkey has been arguing for ages that memorization is a key cognitive skill that is missing from modern education. He’s not wrong.
The primary goal of higher education (which is the “high” in high school) was to curb the feral instincts of the youth and teach them self discipline and useful skills. Team sports direct the violent nature inherent in young men toward (relatively) safe activities that don’t (generally) tear communities apart.
These days, higher education is a taxpayer funded babysitting service for overgrown children that has a side gig of impressing Leftist indoctrination upon them.
Phileas Frogg..”David Starkey has been arguing for ages that memorization is a key cognitive skill that is missing from modern education. He’s not wrong”…here’s an analogy I came up with:
A song by Jakob Dylan includes the following lines:
Cupid, don’t draw back your bow
Sam Cooke didn’t know what I know
…note that in order to understand these two simple lines, you’d have to know several things:
1)You need to know that, in mythology, Cupid symbolizes love
2)And that Cupid’s chosen instrument is the bow and arrow
3)Also that there was a singer/songwriter named Sam Cooke
4)And that he had a song called “Cupid, draw back your bow.”
“Progressive” educators insist that students should be taught “thinking skills” as opposed to memorization, and the advent of LLMs has further driven such thinking But consider: If it’s not possible to understand a couple of lines from a popular song without knowing by heart the references to which it alludes–without memorizing them–what chance is there for understanding medieval history, or modern physics, without having a ready grasp of the topics which these disciplines reference?
And also consider: what’s important is not just what you need to know to appreciate the song. It’s what Dylan needed to know to create it in the first place. At least in theory someone who heard the song and didn’t understand the allusions could have spent 5 minutes googling and figured them out, although this approach wouldn’t be exactly conducive to aesthetic appreciation. But had Dylan not already had the reference points–Cupid, the bow and arrow, the Sam Cooke song–in his head, there’s no way he would have been able to create his own lines. The idea that he could have just “looked them up,” which educators often suggest is the way to deal with factual knowledge, would be ludicrous in this context. And it would also be ludicrous in the context of creating new ideas about history or physics. To use a computer analogy, the things you know aren’t just data–they’re part of the program.
Of teenage boys who are incapable of learning by memorization because it is unnatural and they are not academically inclined, how many can name 11 members of their favourite sports team?
Give me a minute, David, to Google “Bob Dylan”…
The things you know form the threads of your thought.
In any case, never listen to a woman purporting to speak in authority on the raising up of boys. The sensitive young white teen was born to go to war. He should be set loose upon Africa, the Middle East, India, and elsewhere with a Toyota Hilux, some automatic weaponry, and a gas and ammunition ration, provided only that consorting with the local fauna be punishable by death.