The Purpose of High School Education: An Essay

High school is a playground for intellectual adults, full of budding young minds waiting to come to full bloom or to be exploited. In Dead Poets Society, Welton Academy is one such environment. Principal Nolan and all but one teacher chose the exploitation route, raising up the boys of Welton to be robotic clones of themselves and their constricted and limiting ideology. One new teacher at Welton, however, took the road less traveled by. His name was John Keating, and he taught English at Welton. For the duration of his career at Welton, he taught the boys to think for themselves. This, not Nolan's way, is the purpose of high school. Unfortunately, society is permeated with the dingy filth of Nolan and the Nolanites, and we Keatingites are few and far between.

The Nolanites of society teach conformity to society. They despise individualism, because it is different. In Dead Poets Society, Principal Nolan has a talk with Mr. Keating that shows this attitude quite efficiently. Nolan tells Keating that some teachers and parents have complained about his "unorthodox" teaching methods and that he should stick to the Welton script. Keating says to Nolan, "I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself." Nolan replied, "At these boys' age? Not on your life!" Nolan recognizes that all people should think for themselves, but only after they reach that age where their minds can no longer be freed. Raise them up as programmed robots first, and they will never be free of thought. They will only, like Nolan, think they are.

On the other side of the spectrum, you have your Keatingites. For us, education is about freedom: sucking the marrow out of life, as Henry David Thoreau would say. Conformity is a disease that kills individualism and keeps a mind in bondage with the cold and heavy chains wrought by society. In Dead Poets Society, Keating has a student read the introduction of their poetry textbooks by J. Evans Pritchard. In it, Pritchard talks about "rating" poetry on a scale. Poetry must "follow the rules," according to people like Pritchard and Nolan. But as Mr. Keating did in Dead Poets Society, we must stand on our desks and remind ourselves "that we must constantly look at things in a different way."

Finally, you have your in-betweens. You have your Todd Andersons. At first, Todd stuck with conformity and the Nolanites, but he yearned to join the Keatingites. He just didn't know how. When Mr. Keating showed up, however, Todd discovered that it was quite simple: dream and look and think. As Thoreau said, "to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived."

Show me the heart unfettered with foolish dreams, and I will show you a man in bondage. For only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be. Stand on your desk and look all around you. There is so much worthless stuff in this life. "What good amid these"? "That we are here - that life exists, and identity." The show must go on and everyone of us can contribute a verse. What will your verse be?