“Dead Poets Society” (1989) is a beautifully filmed and affecting movie that was nominated for several Academy Awards and won the award for best original screenplay. The film, which stars the late Robin Williams as an energetic and innovative English teacher named John Keating, is set in the late 1950s at an elite boys’ boarding school in New England: the fictional Dalton Academy.
At Dalton, boys are offered a rigorous and traditional education. They are drilled in Latin verbs; they solve advanced math problems; they memorize historical facts. In what was by 1989 a reductionist and ideological rendering of a 1950s educational setting, Dalton students are never explicitly encouraged to find joy in any of their scholastic pursuits. Or, really, in anything.
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