- to attract a huge number of new recruits to replace a generation of teachers about to retire,
- to redress the failures of the educational system at large so that no child is left behind, and
- to define what good teaching looks like so that we meet the needs of schools and kids.
On the other hand, advocates of liberalizing entry into teaching (such as independent schools, many other types of private schools, and their proponents) argue that great teaching has very little, if anything, to do with certification and methodology courses. Rather, it requires knowledge in one or more content areas, passion about one's subject, and a love of kids. "High quality" (vs. "highly qualified") teachers is the mantra of this school of thought — and each of these teachers (at least in middle and secondary schools) has a degree in a discipline he or she teaches and/or life experiences that enrich the teaching itself. The idea here is that one needs to know something deeply to teach it well, and to care about it to teach it passionately.
It's interesting to note that research validates the latter position. It turns out student achievement is highest in schools where the teachers have a degree in what they teach and have high verbal abilities themselves.1 Schools with high-achieving students tend to be those where the teachers have a deep knowledge base about the subject they teach, where the teachers were themselves high-performing students in school and college, and where the teachers are impassioned about their subjects and caring towards the kids they teach.
What light can Dead Poets Society and The Emperor's Club shed on this debate? Lest we become too teary-eyed by the films and their applicability to the debate about high quality teaching, it's worth mentioning first that, by current standards, there is some bad teaching going on in the classrooms of Mr. Hundert (in The Emperor's Club) and by Mr. Keating (in Dead Poets Society). In the latter case, the Robin Williams character is so charismatic and flamboyant and iconoclastic that he, rather than the literature he is attempting to teach, becomes the lesson. Clearly "teacher-centered," he, like Mr.
It's worth adding that the subtext of the both films, of course, is the repressiveness of adults in general and schools in particular, from the adolescent's perspective. In both films, autocratic and controlling fathers (and their symbolic projections in the form of headmasters) sabotage their sons' futures (Neil in Dead Poets Society and Sedgewick in The Emperor's Club). In both films the adolescent allure of the forbidden and its correlative journey (the Dead Poets Society passage through the woods to the cave and The Emperor's Club row across the lake to the girl's school) play prominently. In both films the iconography (flocks of birds in Dead Poets Society and helicopter shots and flights in The Emperor's Club) punctuates symbolically by visual contrast how restricted and proscribed the boys really are in the highly controlled environment of schools. In both films the subtext of off-limits sexuality (the nuns' intervening in the skinny-dipping encounter and the colleague's wife seeking Mr. Hundert's company in one and the Midsummer Night's Dream context of shifting sexual partners and identities in the other) suggests one reason that teaching adolescents is so hard in the first place: the topic that most interests them is least accessible to them, of course, in their classes. In both films, at times, the teachers choose to "blink and wink," avoiding confrontations for anarchic behavior in the classroom. This changes in the case of Mr.
Finally, it is worth noting that both Mr. Hundertand Mr. Keating fail miserably, both with their chosen students (Sedgewick and Neil, the former to end up just a more prominent and successful cheat and the latter to commit suicide rather than face disappointment) and with their own ambitions (Hundert to be named headmaster and Keating to keep his job).
All that said, Robin Williams and Kevin Kline (or at least the characters they play) are, finally, great teachers — the kind just about every moviegoer of any age wished he or she had as a teacher (or, for the lucky among us, the kind each of us has had, at least once). These characters and films are distinguished in that they present teachers as complex, complicated, and flawed — sort of like the rest of us — rather than the one-dimensional and satirized characters one typically sees in films about school. One thinks of the Robin Williams and Kevin Kline characters as worthy successors to those of Robert Donatas Mr. Chips in the 1939 classic Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Sidney Poitier as Mark Thackeray in the 1967 film To Sir, With Love; and Jon Voight as Mr. Conroy in the 1974 film Conrack.
For the private school teachers in the lot, (Chips, Keating, and Hundert), being a teacher is all-consuming: All three are what the independent-school world still calls "triple threats": teachers, coaches, and advisors (or dorm masters in the case of boarding schools). All embody the lessons they teach: for Mr. Keating, that literature liberates. For Mr. Hundert, that history tells a story with powerful lessons about where we came from and who we are. As Mr. Hundert intones to his class, "Great ambition and conquest without contribution is without significance. What will your contribution be?" One can imagine Mr. Keating and Mr. Hundert "team-teaching" the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem "Ozymandias of Egypt," about a fallen statute of a forgotten tyrant, the last five lines of which read:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Indeed, the motto over Mr. Hundert's oor invokes the same theme: The powerful tyrants of history are largely forgotten, victims of the rubble and ruin they created. In fact, the Latin mottos of both Dead Poets Society and The Emperor's Club figure prominently in the storyline and theme of each movie. For Mr. Keating, his whispered carpe diem ("seize the day") is the rallying call for adolescence, an age when students are testing the whole process of separation from parents and rejection of authority as they seek to find who they are and are to become. In that stage of life neither the past nor the future holds much sway, and Mr. Keating has found just the Latin phrase that captures his students' emotional and psychological state. The irrepressible Mr. Keating himself, in some ways, retains that adolescent spirit although garbed in adult clothes and responsibilities. Ironically and sadly, of course, the film proves that Mr. Keating's rallying cry, carpe diem, is tragically misinterpreted by Neil, who sees no past nor future for himself, so concludes that the pain he feels today is not worth living through. In The Emperor's Club, the mottos are non sibi ("not for oneself") and fini origine pendent ("the end is dependent upon the beginning"). In an aesthetic sense, the latter motto is manifest in the structure of the film: we begin and end the film with a helicopter landing in a sylvan setting (that we momentarily confuse to be the school — one of the subliminal suggestions of the social elitism of private schools that seems de rigueur for such films), only to discover that it is a posh country club where Mr. Hundert's former students from 25 years ago have reassembled for a reunion of sorts. More importantly, thematically, we find that "the end is dependent upon the beginning" when we share Mr. Hundert's disgust in discovering that Sedgewick, the student who had disappointed him 25 years ago by cheating in the school's ultimate test of scholarship — the Julius Caesar contest — not only cheats again in the re-enactment of that contest, but stages the entire event to launch a Senatorial campaign. Thus, the plot comes full turn. Sedgewick, son of the distant and manipulative senator seeks to become senator himself, and in the process alienates his own young son.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The rich irony in the denouement of the film occurs when Hundert himself comes clean with another former student in Sedgewick's class, Martin Blyth, whom Mr. Hundert had cheated out of a shot at the Mr. Julius Caesar contest by grading too generously a competitor's (Sedgewick's) qualifying essay. It is Martin, in the last scene, who actually has grown the most, and so appreciates Mr. Hundert's contribution to his own success that he sends his son, the third generation, to St. Benedict's to experience himself the richness of Mr. Hundert's presence.
Who you are, less than what you teach, is what finally counts most, in teaching as in all walks of life. This is the lesson of the great teachers like Mr. Keating and Mr. Hundert, the lesson they model and teach.
In the independent school world, we eschew the current bromide of hiring only "highly qualified teachers" (meaning certified in education courses). An axiom we offer at the NAIS Institute for New Heads is, "Hire happy people." The axiom is shorthand for: "Of course you'll hire people who are knowledgeable and smart; of course you'll hire people with high (emotional intelligence) that match their high IQs (academic intelligence); of course, you'll hire people who love kids. Given all that, remember to hire happy people." We mean those like Mr. Keating and Mr. Hundert who themselves, however flawed at times, are essentially whole and engaging and optimistic people, since to do otherwise is to dull the promise that each child brings to the enterprise of school. Hire someone "who will make all the difference in the life of a child."