Appreciating Dead Poets Society

Don't listen to philistines; follow your dreams.

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[M]edicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

–John Keating, Dead Poets Society (1989)

Neil Perry has his latent passion for acting unlocked by his heterodox mentor John Keating. Unfortunately for Neil, the only role his father appreciates is that of “the dutiful son”: the son who doggedly pursues his father’s dream of becoming a doctor. When Neil decides to pursue his own passion, playing Puck in a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his father callously chastises him. Mr. Perry demands to know what could possibly justify Neil’s defiance and, when no response is forthcoming, sentences Neil to Braden Military School. Dejected and despairing, Neil takes his own life, adding macabre meaning to the resurrected poetry club he led.

Doubtless, given his horror at the sight of Neil’s lifeless body, Mr. Perry had sacrificed greatly for his son to receive a quality education and lead a better life than him. Tragically, Mr. Perry conceives of the good life in narrow, superficial terms: “You’re going to Harvard and you’re gonna be a doctor.” As the son of two doctors—surgeons—I agree that the Hippocratic profession is a high calling; sustaining life is an awesome responsibility, vocation, and privilege. Doctors do their damnedest to preserve the lives of their patients so that they may lead ones of “poetry, beauty, romance, [and] love”: the very things that make life worth living.

Mr. Perry was too ignorant to see that Neil’s acting provided his life—and those lucky enough to see him perform—with these intrinsic goods. Mr. Perry made “a great many sacrifices to get” Neil to Welton, but he was too blind to see that Neil’s pursuit of acting, his highest calling, was honoring these sacrifices, not disregarding them.

As I prepare myself to begin my job at Reason, I am grateful that my own parents are Mr. Keatings, not Mr. Perrys: they always told me and my brother to pursue what gives us meaning instead of what others esteem. I benefited from many Mr. Keatings: Señor Lizcano, my middle school Spanish teacher; each of my high school Spanish teachers: Señora Olmedo, Señor Uceda, Señor Blessent, and Señora Núñéz; Mr. Fomin, my calculus teacher; my high school English teachers: Mr. Grossman, Dr. Tramantano, and Ms. Robinson; Mr. Schorr, my high school US history teacher; and many professors at Dartmouth College: Henry Clark, Meir Kohn, John Welborn, Ian Cruise, and Michael Wyatt. Other mentors include Harvey Jaswal, Joshua Bandoch, my brother, and my late grandfather David Svahn.

Without these sages, I would almost certainly be blindly pursuing a career instrumental to some unspecified end. Thanks to them, I have the great privilege to do work I find intrinsically gratifying.

I wish everyone has a Mr. Keating in their life and I hope to stand in this relation to at least one person someday.

Three cheers for Mr. Keating, historical and fictional—all real in a sense it would take a poet (like Emerson) to explain.