Dead Poets Society Lied To You
On Dead Poets Society and the Crisis of the Humanities
When asked for my favourite film, I can’t stop thinking about one that is set in a Vermont boarding school in the late 1950s. Where rules are strict, the rooms are spare. The boys wear uniforms and carry expectations like heavy baggage. So comes in Mr. Keating, a new English teacher, once a student there himself. He tells them to tear out pages of their textbook. He tells them to listen closely to the past. He tells them to Carpe Diem. Just like you, my dear reader, I saw Dead Poets Society young enough to be moved, but not old enough to question the movement. The gestures felt grand. The sentiments rang loud. Everything seemed like it mattered immediately. I didn’t know yet that urgency and depth are not the same.
It’s different now. Rewatching it doesn’t erase what I once felt, it just brings in something slower. The camera holds longer than I remembered. The light looks harsher. The boys feel younger. The voice, once electric, now sounds like it’s reaching. There’s still a pull to it. not nostalgia exactly, but a familiarity that’s harder to place. as if it was coming across a photograph of yourself from before you learned the shape of your own silence.
This film hasn’t changed but it’s no longer asking the same things of me. What it asks now is harder to receive without resistance. When I return to the classroom scenes, the ones that once felt alive with possibility, something falters. not in their energy, but in what that energy rests on. Keating arrives with lightness. He moves through the room easily, unhindered by hierarchy. The students respond in kind and gosh they quote poetry before they know what it means, although they quote it with conviction. They roar, tear out textbook page, walk in circles, take turns breaking formation. what he offers them isn’t literature, but a mood.
The film treats this as liberation. It positions Keating against a rigid system and lets his looseness stand in for meaning but what remains unclear is whether the freedom he offers has any weight behind it. The boys are never asked to read closely. There’s no attention to how a poem is built, how its metaphors hold or break. Literature appears only as a source of feeling. It isn’t studied. It’s consumed.
The gesture of tearing out the introduction is meant to be symbolic of a rejection of formulaic measurement but it removes more than that. It rejects the method entirely. Once the page is gone, nothing replaces it. What’s left is the idea that to love poetry is enough. That to feel stirred is a form of understanding.
It’s a view of the humanities that resonates with how they are often caricatured now: beautiful, expressive, emotionally generous; and intellectually thin. Keating doesn’t teach literature so much as perform around it. He invokes Whitman and Thoreau like incantations. The boys are moved, but never asked to reflect on why. A poem becomes meaningful the moment it provokes something in them. Interpretation gives way to impression.
This matters because it speaks to the broader crisis the humanities are facing. Between 2012 and 2020, degrees awarded in core humanities fields declined by as much as 29 percent. By 2020, fewer than one in ten college graduates held a humanities degree, and only four percent majored in English, history, philosophy, or foreign languages The decline extends beyond rhetoric. Institutions are tightening budgets, consolidating, even canceling programs. Just recently, a respected university suspended PhD admissions entirely in fields like English, history, and philosophy citing financial constraints. In Australia, similar pressures have cut humanities enrollment by 35 percent over a decade. Meanwhile in England, the head of the British Academy warns of a “vicious spiral” in which reduced enrolments beget further cuts, eroding the “holistic and formative power of the humanities” Elsewhere In India, the humanities carry social baggage. They’re often labeled “easy” or “non-earning,” dismissed by students, parents, and institutions in favour of STEM or commerce streams.
The question lingers: what is the value of studying literature, history, philosophy, if not to prepare for a job? And if even the cultural artifacts that claim to defend the humanities do so only by sentimentalising them, then the defence collapses.
Keating’s classroom confirms what critics of the humanities already suspect: that the arts are soft, that they belong to dreamers, that they have no discipline, no argument, no edge. That they can inspire, yes—but not instruct.
In this way, the film becomes part of the very problem it seems to mourn. It tries to protect the humanities by offering them as feelings. But feeling doesn’t last long in institutions built on outcome. Real survival demands we do more than feel. It requires that we think, argue, revise, disagree. That we build humanities not as a mood but as a way of attending, as a practice of caring for language, for history, for thought itself. Keatings leaves out precisely what makes literature endure: the practice of attention. To read a poem is not to lift a phrase into the air and chant it like an anthem, but to stay with its turns, to notice where it strains, where its rhythm falters, where its words touch the world beyond themselves.
This is the part the film resists, because patience is not cinematic. Still, it matters. Matthew Arnold once claimed the humanities offered us “the best that has been thought and said,” not because they could be recited but because they could be wrestled with, argued over, held against the times we live in. Martha Nussbaum insists that their value lies in cultivating a “narrative imagination,” the ability to inhabit another’s perspective. But that imagination is not born in slogans. It emerges in the slow work of interpretation.
To sit with a line of Whitman or even Thoreau is to ask what it meant in their moment and what it might mean in ours. It is to ask why its metaphors still carry force, or why they fall flat. Paul Ricoeur called this a “long detour”: meaning comes not in the first feeling but in the process of circling, questioning, revising. This is the work that makes the humanities more than mood. Without it, they collapse into decoration, moving in the moment but disposable the next.
There is also a deeper irony. Dead Poets Society critiques institutions that flatten the humanities into measurable outcomes, yet it mirrors the same logic by turning literature into spectacle. What else is Keating’s “O Captain! My Captain!” if not a performance designed to move, to be remembered, to circulate like a meme before memes? The film packages the humanities in their most digestible form—emotion, inspiration, uplift—because that is what audiences, and perhaps institutions, already know how to consume. It offers us the humanities without difficulty, stripped of their demand for interpretation, context, or critique.
In this way, the film is less a failed defense than a cultural symptom. It reveals a collective desire: we want the humanities, but we want them easy. We want the charge of Whitman without the labour of parsing his verse. We want philosophy as quotation, not as argument. We want to be stirred, not slowed and when the stirring fades, as it always does, the question of value remains unanswered.
What Dead Poets Society mistakes for liberation is really performance, a brief spark designed to dazzle. The harder, less photogenic truth is that the humanities survive not in gestures but in habits: the long argument, the contested archive, the refusal to let words pass unexamined. Keating told his students to seize the day; the humanities at their strongest ask us to do something rarer—to inhabit it fully.
The “feeling” of poetry and literature is not at all a frivolous aspect. AI can perfectly analyze a poem, discuss its structure and meaning, it can do all the “hard work”. And students are using it to do just that. What AI cannot do is feel. It cannot be swept up in the exhilaration of the profound movement of a poem. To reduce what is a deeply emotive expression only to its structures and analytics is to miss the point, and to rob a student of the passion that will carry them into a love of literature (a love that inevitably leads to a desire for understanding the writing itself). This isn’t an either/or, both are necessary. To slough of the role of “feeling” where it relates to literature is a denial of the very aspects of the human experience that are most at risk currently. Ask any young person who has grown up with the internet- they just want to feel something, something real. The rest will follow.
ahh, as a lover of this film i absolutely love this perspective. I'd only want to add that the performance of the way the film interacts with literature seems to me to be a way to counteract the rigidness of the schools curriculum. what neil, todd, and the other boys needed was the performance, the liveliness of poetry and spoken word, the feelings, they needed the "carpe diem" of it all. they needed to be able to break free from the rules more than i think they needed the structure and more intellectual approach to studying literature. i think where i differ in my understanding of the film is that i dont see it to be a response to people who believe humanities to be unimportant ( though im sure thats part of it!) i see it as a film more interesting in exploring the emotional depth of our characters & how they change, grow, and develop when given the chance to exist somewhat more freely. when they are met with creative freedom and not harsh straight lines. thats sorta the beauty and tragedy of dead poets society i guess. These boys have only known the straight lines and have never been given a chance to dance outside of them. which makes its ending that much more painful. upon rewatchs, it is the moments of silence, of gleeful youth, and the deafening silence when that youth is ripped away that still stick to me like glue. to me this film is about the pressures parents place on us to be who they think we should be vs getting to choose our own path instead. i love what you say at the end "Keating told his students to seize the day; the humanities at their strongest ask us to do something rarer—to inhabit it fully."
stunning essay! loved this fully
(edit: all in all I'd say dead poets isn't necessarily about finding a love for Humanities/writing/poetry, but is about finding a love and passion for life and what it could be through the lens of poetry. <3 )