Dead Poets Society and the dangerous seduction of Romanticism

When inspiration becomes indoctrination.

This week’s episode is a bit of a departure for us. We’re “reviewing” 1989’s classic film Dead Poet’s Society to explore it’s messages about education. You can watch Martin and I chew it over, listen to the podcast and read my write up below.

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Thirty-five years on, Dead Poets Society still holds sway over the hearts of students, teachers, and anyone who ever wanted to stand on a desk and shout poetry into the void. But should it?

The film is often treated as a love letter to literature, teaching, and youthful rebellion. But scratch the surface, and it becomes clear that Dead Poets Society may be less a celebration of the humanities and more a sentimental distortion of them. The inspirational Mr Keating is a Romantic fantasy, not at all a model teacher. And like all such fantasies, it has consequences when adapted to the real world.

That said, it’s hard to dislike the film. I rewatched recently on a long haul flight and found it visually rich, emotionally resonant, and anchored by one of Robin Williams most restrained and humane performances. Director Peter Weir fills the film with autumnal nostalgia. The candle-lit meetings, the whispering woods, the ivy-draped classrooms; it all feels like something profound is happening. But it’s also deeply manipulative. It trades in sweeping emotional arcs, tragic sacrifice, and uplifting monologues, often at the expense of intellectual coherence or pedagogical reality.

You don’t need to hate the film to see the danger in uncritically embracing its message.

Set in a rigid 1950s prep school, Dead Poets Society follows a group of boys inspired by their new English teacher, Mr Keating. Encouraged to “seize the day,” they revive a secret poetry club and experiment with individuality, rebellion, and emotional expression. For Neil Perry, this means pursuing his dream of acting. For Todd Anderson (played by an impossibly youthful Ethan Hawke) it means finding his voice. And for Mr Keating? It means a return to his past.

Things fall apart. Neil takes his own life after his father forbids him from acting. Keating is blamed. The society dissolves. The boys return to order but not without scars.

Importantly, Mr Keating Is not the hero. Williams plays Keating with a mix of tenderness and theatricality, but he’s a cipher. We know almost nothing about him. Why is he in this job? What does he actually teach? His quirkiness - tea, football, the odd British affectation - is never explained. He’s less a character than a McGuffin: his presence kicks off the plot, but he doesn’t evolves and at the end is ushered out like a failed Mary Poppins.

Keating does almost nothing. He doesn’t help Neil navigate his controlling father. He doesn’t intervene when students take dangerous risks. He inspires, but never instructs. His pedagogy is all performance, no structure, no guidance, no tackling tough ideas.

But then, It’s not Keating’s story: it’s Neil’s and Todd’s. Neil, with his dream of acting and tragic trajectory, is a textbook Romantic hero: passionate, doomed, and misunderstood. Todd is the one who grows, finding his voice in the film’s most famous scene, when he finally stands on his desk and salutes Keating with Whitman’s line, “O Captain, my Captain.” But even Todd’s growth is ambiguous. Has he been empowered? Or, like us, simply caught in the sentimental swell of the moment?

In Keating’s classroom - or, more often, outside it - literature is not so much treated as an object of study as a catalyst for self-discovery. Poems arrive like secret messages from the past, to be whispered in caves, scrawled in notebooks, or declaimed from desks. The boys don’t encounter poetry as the slow, deliberate work of close reading; they encounter it as a series of talismanic snippets, fragments of language charged with emotional power.

Arguably the most famous quotation in the film, “O Captain, my Captain…” from Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, mourning a leader felled before his work was done, is transformed into a student-to-teacher salute. In Whitman’s poem, the “captain” is a dead president; in Welton Academy, Keating is mythologising himself in real time. At no point do we see the poem explored, or even read in full, it becomes a mere gobbet, a nickname, a shared password in his cult of inspiration.

Keating uses the quote from Thoreau’s Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach…” as the rallying cry for the revived Dead Poets Society. He frames Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond as a metaphor for rejecting conformity and embracing life on one’s own terms. In the film, it’s less about 19th-century American Transcendentalism’s critique of industrial society, and more about personal authenticity and adventure. Thoreau’s political radicalism, his minimalist ethics is left aside. The focus is on the romance of escape. Telling, the quote is not completed: “…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.“

Also from Whitman - this time, aptly, from Song of Myself - Keating exhorts his students to “sound [their] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” This is an unashamed declaration of self-expression. Keating uses it as an exercise in spontaneity, coaxing the painfully shy Todd Anderson into improvising a poem aloud. It’s a teaching moment, but it’s about performance, not textual analysis. The yawp is all about breaking inhibition, and not at all in engaging Whitman’s sprawling, democratic vision of the self.

And, most egregiously, Keating whispers a line from Robert Frost’s most famous poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’:

Two paths diverged in a wood and I— 
I took the one less traveled by 
And that has made all the difference.

Keating wields the poem as a banner for nonconformity: take the path “less travelled by.” But this ignores both that Frost himself described the poem as a “joke,” and that the Keating interpretation ignores the poem’s ironies. Both paths were “really about the same,” and that our sense of choosing uniquely is often a retrospective fiction. In the classroom, it becomes a clean, uncomplicated encouragement to “make your own way,” stripped of Frost’s ambivalence about choice and memory. The final stanza, rather than being a celebration of taking the more difficult path, is a post hoc confabulation in which the narrator boasts that “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence” that his very ordinary decision to take a random route becomes, through the haze of memory and self-deception, an aggrandized version of events. The “sigh” may be satisfaction, regret, or simply the wistful performance of a life narrated to sound more deliberate than it was. Frost’s genius lies in leaving that ambiguity unresolved, forcing us to confront how we mythologise our own choices.

Keating’s use of the poem erases this complexity. In his classroom, The Road Not Taken becomes a motivational poster: a neat moral about individuality, detached from the text’s wry acknowledgment that most of our decisions are far less singular than we like to imagine. The subtle mockery of self-dramatising memory is replaced by a clear-cut imperative: be different and “sieze the day”. What’s lost is precisely what makes Frost’s poem enduring: its refusal to tell us whether “difference” is something we truly choose or merely something we later tell ourselves we did.

Keating’s use of “The Road Not Taken“ reveals much about his approach to teaching. He treats literature less as an object of study than as a storehouse of quotable lines, each ready to be cut, pasted, and redeployed as inspiration. The poems become delivery systems for life lessons rather than works to be interrogated on their own terms. Whether he understands the original context and chooses to ignore it, or never truly engages with it in the first place, is impossible to say. The effect is the same: meaning is whatever serves his immediate purpose. His method is seductive, but it encourages students to read for personal resonance alone, rather than to wrestle with what a text might actually mean. In this sense, Keating models selective misreading and he does so with such charm that few of the boys think to question.

The other staff at Welton Academy do question though. When challenged, Keating defends himself by saying his job is to get the boys to “think for themselves.” In his mind, this justifies the stripping down of poems to their emotional core: the point is not to master content, but to awaken autonomy. It’s a classic Romantic defence: better a flawed but self-generated thought than a perfectly recited line of received wisdom.

The headmaster, Mr Nolan, pointedly disagrees. For him, the school’s purpose is to produce disciplined young men prepared for elite universities: conformity, not idiosyncrasy, is the goal. Nolan’s dissent isn’t merely authoritarian grumbling; it reflects a fundamentally different theory of education. Where Keating believes in cultivating self-expression, Nolan believes thinking for yourself is not the starting point but the culmination of a long process of intellectual formation: you earn the right to independence by first mastering the structures, disciplines, and inherited knowledge that will make it meaningful. Keating, by contrast, wants the boys to begin with independence, trusting - naively - that the rest will follow. The clash is not simply between repression and freedom, but between two incompatible sequences: Nolan insists that discipline precedes liberty, Keating that discipline is anathema to the flowering of human potential.

This tension runs through the film. Keating wants the boys to improvise their readings, tear pages from their anthologies, and see themselves in the poets they recite. Nolan wants them to respect the text, the hierarchy, and the tradition. The irony, of course, is that Keating’s “think for yourself” mantra often comes pre-packaged as his way of thinking: a curated Romanticism in which the “correct” way to be independent is to respond emotionally, dramatically, and in line with his own enthusiasms. The boys are liberated from rote learning, but they’re also subtly channelled into his preferred vision of liberation.

This clash between Keating and Nolan is exactly the kind of fault line Isaiah Berlin spent much of his career mapping. In his famous lecture on Two Concepts of Liberty, Berlin distinguished between negative liberty (freedom from interference) and positive liberty (the freedom to realise one’s potential, often through the guidance of an authority.)

Keating’s pedagogy is grounded in negative liberty: remove the constraints, tear out the preface, let the boys chart their own course. Nolan’s is unapologetically positive in the older, paternalistic sense: the teacher knows what the student needs, and mastery of the canon comes first. Berlin’s insight is that both models have dangers. Unchecked negative liberty can become drift or chaos, just as rigid positive liberty can harden into coercion. The argument playing out in Welton Academy’s oak-panelled corridors is not just a dispute about school rules, but a miniature version of a centuries-old philosophical battle, one that Romanticism, with its exaltation of authenticity and rebellion, decisively tilted in Keating’s favour.

But of course, the film is heading towards disaster. Neil’s suicide is the point where the film’s philosophical tensions move from the abstract to the tragic. It’s the moment where Romanticism’s promise of liberation collides with authoritarianism’s demand for obedience and neither side emerges clean.

From Berlin’s perspective, Neil is caught between two incompatible liberties. Keating offers negative liberty: the freedom to define himself, to act according to his own desires, in Neil’s case, acting in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His father, Mr Perry, enforces a hard form of positive liberty: he knows what’s “best” for Neil, and will compel him to follow that predetermined path, in this case medicine. The confrontation is pure Romanticism versus authoritarian paternalism, authenticity versus imposed purpose.

The tragedy is that neither model contains the resources Neil needs. Keating gives him inspiration without protection; the courage to stand up to his father, but not the tools to negotiate, compromise, or withstand the consequences. Mr Perry gives him structure without humanity; a clear path, but one imposed so brutally that it crushes Neil’s spirit. In Berlin’s terms, Neil is denied the combination of liberty and support that might have allowed him to flourish.

Is Keating responsible? In a narrow sense, no: he doesn’t cause Neil’s death, and the blame lies most directly with the father’s intransigence. But Keating does help create the conditions for the crisis. His Romantic idealism encourages Neil to act decisively in the name of selfhood, yet offers no counsel on how to navigate entrenched authority or survive when liberty meets its limits. Inspiration without strategy is a dangerous gift.

The school’s response - to scapegoat Keating and reinforce its authoritarian norms - shows how easily a failed exercise in negative liberty can be used to justify doubling down on positive liberty in its most coercive form. In the end, Berlin’s warning about the perils of both extremes plays out exactly: freedom without structure leaves Neil vulnerable; structure without freedom makes him despair. The tragedy is not that one side “won,” but that the boy was left with nothing in between.

The final classroom scene, and probably the most memorable scene in the film, sees Todd and a handful of boys standing on their desks to salute Keating with the moniker, “O Captain! my Captain!”. This is both an emotional bookend to his first lesson but is also staged to be rousing, defiant, and redemptive: the Romantic disciple honouring the Romantic teacher in one last symbolic act of loyalty.

But when we strip away the swell of Maurice Jarre’s music and the camera’s slow upward tilt, the moment looks more complicated. The boys are not reclaiming their education or overturning the school’s authority. Keating is still fired. Nolan is still in charge. Most of the class remains seated. The salute is a gesture; brave in its way, but entirely symbolic, costing the boys little beyond a reprimand.

The line itself, torn from Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, has been transformed across the film from a playful nickname into a badge of allegiance. In Whitman’s poem, the captain is dead, the ship has come to harbour, and the nation mourns its leader. In Welton Academy, the “captain” is not dead, only dismissed; the voyage is not over, merely interrupted. The boys aren’t mourning a fallen leader so much as performing their grief by adopting the poem’s emotional register without its historical weight.

This, again, is Keating’s Romantic pedagogy in miniature: literature as an emotional resource, a set of potent fragments to be deployed in the service of self-expression. The final tableau is deeply moving, but it’s also ambiguous. It affirms the bond between teacher and pupils, yet does nothing to challenge the structures that crushed Neil or expelled Keating. As with much of the film, its power lies in the feeling it generates, not in the change it effects. It’s the perfect Romantic ending: beautiful, stirring, and, in practical terms, entirely symbolic.

Taken on its own terms, Dead Poets Society is a gorgeous, emotionally resonant piece of filmmaking. It’s full of quotable lines, atmospheric imagery, and Robin Williams at his most restrained and magnetic. It makes literature feel alive, urgent, and personal. It makes teaching look like a vocation of liberation rather than administration. It makes you want to stand on a desk.

But as a statement about education, it’s far more problematic. The film’s central message, that great teaching is about inspiring students to “seize the day” and “think for themselves,” is intoxicating, but also dangerously incomplete. It sets up a false dichotomy between Romantic self-expression and authoritarian conformity, as though the only choice were between Keating’s poetry-fuelled liberation and Nolan’s oak-panelled orthodoxy. It ignores the possibility that structure and inspiration might coexist, that rigour and creativity are not enemies but partners in the long work of intellectual growth.

Keating’s flaw is that he gives his students passion without the scaffolding to channel it; Nolan’s flaw is that he offers structure without humanity. The tragedy of Neil Perry is that he’s caught between these absolutes with no middle ground to stand on. In Berlin’s terms, the film dramatises the dangers of both negative liberty without support and positive liberty without compassion.

So what should we think of it? Admire it, certainly, for the way it makes poetry matter to a mass audience, for its belief in the transformative power of words. But we should also resist its seductions. Dead Poets Society is not a manual for teaching. It’s a Romantic fantasy - beautiful, stirring, and dangerously partial - and if we take it as truth rather than myth, we risk mistaking inspiration for education, and slogans for the slow, often unglamorous work of helping young people grow.