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Robert B. Heilman, "The Great-Teacher Myth"
in: American Scholar, vol. 60, 3/1991, p. 417 - 423

Heilman, emeritierter Professor für Englisch an der University of Washington in Seattle, "entmythologisiert" in diesem brillant geschriebenen umfangreichen Aufsatz die Keatings dieser Welt. Unter "Keatings" versteht er berühmte Lehrer, "Gurus" im schulischen und universitären Bereich. Die Ausführungen würden genügend Stoff für ein pädagogisches Seminar bieten; doch so interessant sie auch sind, für schulische Zwecke sind am ehesten sprachlich griffige Passagen aus Heilmans Einleitung zu gebrauchen, wo er sich direkt auf den Film bezieht, und es beispielsweise heißt: "The hero, John Keating, accomplishes nothing ... Nothing is changed, but we see Keating watching with smirking self-satisfaction, as if he had in fact dethroned a tyrant, instead of choreographing a fake rebellion against a fake villain... What he should have been fired for was making himself, instead of the works of literature, the object of adulation. The film is immoral; it presents a fraud as a hero." Solche und ähnliche Aussagen fordern zur Diskussion heraus, vor allem bei solchen SchülerInnen, für die "Dead Poets Society" ein Kultfilm ist. Angemerkt sei noch, daß laut Heilman der Gedichtband "Understanding Poetry" als Schulbuch seinerzeit tatsächlich existierte, daß aber das Vorwort von J. E. Pritchard, welches im Film eine so bedeutende Rolle für die Charakterisierung Keatings spielt, reine Fiktion ist.

The film Dead Poets Society is now well past its once front-page status, and it may be possible to look at some of its implications without having to duck live or postal fisticuffs. Hilary Mantel's review in the Spectator (October 7, 1989), charmingly entitled "Alien Corn," ended thus: "[Robin Williams's] dominant, self-conscious presence surely cannot disguise, even from his fans, that the film is platitudinous, overblown and absurd. But enough. AIready I hear the postman's tread." Perhaps any anti-Mantel admirer of the film would have been mollified by The New Yorker's "In Brief" encomium, which singularly abjured metropolitan skepticism: "The picture draws out the obvious and turns itself into a classic [which] has a gold ribbon attached to it." These diverse judgments resemble those in the movie house where I saw the film. A fellow academic and I, who at movies are sometimes given to napping or to feeling that the two hours are not well spent, were not only kept awake by Dead Poets Society but put into a bit of a snit by it. The audience, however, behaved quite differently: they all but gave it a standing ovation - an amazing response to a film.
Our women companions come in somewhere between asperity and alleluias. They could listen calmly to the opinionated. In saying my piece, I fell into some familiar terms of dramatic criticism. "Well, they take such a stale line. It's old-fashioned melodrama gussied up to look like educational criticism. First you've got this guy on a white horse charging in to save the place. So you need some set-up black hats to make him look like a hero instead of a moral egotist. Look at what a monstrous, trite, overstuffed setup you get - a school principal that looks like a travesty of Thomas Arnold. The type hasn't been seen since Dickens. You get a Hitlerish papa who screams orders about his son's career. These long-dead types in the 1950s! And when the hero sets out to look like an intellectual giant, he takes aim at a textbook passage on poetry that would have seemed dated in 1910. lf the guy in the white hat is in the end a rather simple, sentimental self-worshiper, the scriptwriters are unblushingly devious: they not only invent a passage of incredible stupidity, but they attribute it to a volume conspicuously entitled Understanding Poetry. This is, of course, the title of an actual textbook, one that was very influential in its day. The authors of it did not say, and would not be caught dead saying, anything faintly resembling the passage that the instructor, John Keating, so spectacularly takes off against. The authors could sue the producers for defamation of character. Well, this falsification of fact goes naturally along with the general falsification of human reality."
When one starts putting into specific words the general annoyance aroused by the film, one warms to the task. "The hero, John Keating, accomplishes nothing. As for the student rebellion against the incredible headmaster, it is only a temporary kneejerk application of a Keating gesture. Nothing is changed, but we see Keating watching with smirking selfsatisfaction, as if he had in fact dethroned a tyrant, instead of choreographing a fake rebellion against a fake villain. The film gets the firing of this rebel all wrong. It says he was fired for fighting injustice. What he should have been fired for was making himself, instead of the works of literature, the object of adulation. The film is immoral: it presents a fraud as a hero."
Oh my, I had slipped into Savonarolese. Or, let's just say I got something off my chest. My male companion was roughly on the same wavelength as I. Then one of our female companions said, "Yes, we never do see Keating teaching anything." The matter could not have been better put. What we see is moonlight larks and forest frolics - midsummer nights' dream fantasies taken for actualities, instead of that steady book work, aided by sensible explication, that might lead to some education. Keating is not a teacher at all but a performer (the boys call him "Captain"). Like Eugene O'Neill's father, he enacts only one lifetime role: he has cast himself as the gutsy, charismatic, infallible, one-in-a-million guide against the system. Any system needs critics, but Keating is only a guy with a mike in a midnight show.
The film, of course, gets only one-half the picture because it gets only one-half the character. The missing element was identified by Bruce Bawer in his excellent review in the American Spectator (August 1989). Aside from pointing out such artifices as those described here, Bawer shrewdly noted that Dead Poets Society has the same theme as the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: both portray the style and influence of a star teacher in a preparatory school. But in Miss Jean Brodie we see the full character: the self-worship and power-love of the spectacular teacher who manages to seem superior to a whole cadre of routine-bound dull souls. When I viewed Miss Jean Brodie again on my VCR, I found the older film not only convincing but absorbing, indeed thrilling. In contrast with the myopia of Dead Poets Society, it had insight into the singular nexus between certain leadership gifts and the ego that cannot settle for a steady engagement in the common enterprise but must star in public displays of extraordinary powers over the young. I have only one slight reservation about this otherwise excellent film: that Miss Brodie's admiration of Mussolini and Franco should have been hinted at rather than stressed, and her comeuppance less hammered home. Perhaps this overtness seemed necessary in 1961, the date of Muriel Spark's novel on which the film was based. Be that as it may, the film had precisely what Dead Poets Society, two decades later, lacked: alertness to the moral reality of the tale - to the cult-Führer implicit in the upset-the-peach-basket lectern Star, the Eikonoklastes who becomes an Eikon.
Some time after seeing Dead Poets Society I ran into a friend who was the successful headmaster of a reputable private school. I asked him whether in his professional life he had ever encountered a Keating. Oh yes, he said, you run into them now and then. He identified by name the current Keating at his own school. This man had written a somewhat best-selling book, one that rather questioned the whole educational process. Hence he had become the resident wise man; he was given to acknowledging his own wisdom, running a special classroom show, condescending to his colleagues, and thus creating a followership that did not ease the basic processes of the school.
An older man, he was perhaps on the way to the role depicted in a 1972 drama, Robert Marasco's Child's Play - a brilliant portrayal of an increasing but undefined moral epidemic in a boys preparatory school. Marasco successfully dramatizes, by nightmarish situations that cross over into the surrealistic, the growth of an apparently inexplicable evil spirit in the boys. They are cruel to each other; they are insolent and threatening to faculty and officers; and they particularly victimize one instructor who has won the unpopularity prize of the term. We slowly identify the corrupting influence in the school: the faculty member who is the professional student-lover, the grand old man who, adored by the students, calls them "my boys" (exactly the style of Miss Brodie and Keating). In this English teacher - one more of us, alas - Marasco catches the substitution of personality for a decent discipline, of amiability for the instructional integrity that makes demands, of a subtle flattery for the more difficult task of assisting the young to grow up. Behind this style lies the instructor's pure self-love; it appears as an indiscriminate affection for students that nurtures their self-indulgence. This self-indulgence, when students are freed from the authority of learning and of moral direction, helps release the aggressive nastiness that is always present in human nature. Marasco carries out to a logical extreme the "spoiling" of young people by uncritical, apparently affectionate tolerance, and he does it by a brilliant paradox: Mr. Chips as Satanic seducer.
It is useful to have a picture of the Brodie-Keating type carried on into advanced years. Brodie and Keating, of course, got fired early, one of them seen through, the other apparently surviving, at least for a moment, in a student style that we are asked to believe is the herald of a new and better world.
The faculty type most recently represented by Keating is, ultimately, less that of a teacher than a performer. He enacts the role of the solitary, anti-crowd voice (the "lonely, self-romanticizing egotist," Bruce Bawer calls him). He is not the occasional individual morally committed against a majority, obviously essential to the well-being of a society, but the professional moral soloist who always has it right while the rest of the world drags on routinely and unseeingly. He alerts the young to circumambient evils and neglected truths while colleagues and administrators drudgingly stick to formalistic ruts. He hints that he has to pay a price. The role forced upon him tends to be the central one in the Passion Play. He struggles to push for truth, but it is hard going against centurions, Pharisees, money changers in the temple, and so forth. (The man sometimes said to have been the real-life original of Keating, a university professor for many years, has published several volumes of essays, and several years ago took on the difficult responsibility of membership on a school board. He would have real grounds for complaint about cinematic misrepresentation.)

II

The Keating types that I have observed directly have performed on the university stage. It is a rare university that does not have its own resident Keating. He tends to become the local Great Teacher, a resonant voice that beguiles its publics (undergraduates and off-campus auditors) while leaving colleagues unmoved, ironic, or simply enduring. As a friend of mine put it, he trades respect from his equals in for adulation by a more populous world. I leave unanswered the question of whether the Great Teacher can also be a good teacher. It may be technically possible, if not probable. The Great Teacher is remembered as a hot on-stage performer, the good teacher as a cool expositor of a body of knowledge that is the essential survivor in memory. The Great Teacher lives in memory as a striking figure, the good teacher as the voice of a field.
Looking a little further at the Keating roles, one discovers that in one manifestation he is the Great Teacher in only one academic field. There he tends to create a sect by seeming to have provided a basic key to human and societal problems. It is a little difficult, as I know by experience, to have in one's class a delegation of Keatingians, who can hardly put up with textual readings not obviously in accord with their master's finalities. His doctrine gives them a corner on Truth. Eric Voegelin makes this point in Autobiographical Reflections, where he has written of students who "will not tolerate information that is not in agreement with their ideological prejudices."
But it is a rare Keating who is content to provide a gospel in only one field of knowledge. He is instinctively a generalist who roams the great wide world of information and ideas and makes authoritative disclosures everywhere. Formally he may be historian, psychologist, sociologist, or master of whatever subject interests him at the moment, but he covers the cosmos, partly as encyclopedist, but more as a celebrator of the unrecognized, and most of all as the revealer of widespread inequities, pretenses, and frauds. One suspects that he has a touch of the Prometheus complex, but he is really less interested in stealing fire from the gods than in lighting fires under them. Hence he may be tempted to join such anti-Olympian activities as student marches, protests, and demos, but these have an inherent shortcoming: they tend to impose anonymity unless the TV cameramen are especially discriminating. Hyde Park is better; it gives full scope to the individual golden tongue. But all lecterns are worthy stages, and they are the essential props.
Keatings will teach summer school, night school, and extension courses, and resist retirement. One woman auditor of a certain Keating (and obviously more an admirer than a detractor) told me, "His life is the podium. He never wants the final bell to ring. When the lecture is over, he is dead." With such a stream of appearances, the performer tends to play familiar roles. More accurately, there is only one role, the White Hat role; it is rather the chosen topics that become familiar. Once my wife and I had to attend an institutional dinner at which the Keating of the time was the featured speaker. We found ourselves coming up with the same question:. "What will he do tonight - Vietnam or Watergate?" Our topics were wrong, but our idea was right. The themes were Nagasaki and poverty. Apartheid and Palestine got into the repertory later. And of course all American styles in Central and South America.
Keating's feeling for audiences means that he is a star in the city and the region in which his university is located. He charms listeners as he holds forth on many political, social, and economic topics. His role is instinctively that of the man of insight who, despite institutional indifference or even hostility, is bringing truth home to hearers who would otherwise be deprived of it. What ultimate influence his ideas and attitudes have upon the beliefs and actions of his audiences no one knows. The one unmistakable effect is the admiration for the speaker who enacts, with a great deal of stage presence and skill, this love of truths otherwise neglected, this perception of failure in most of the powers that be, this unique grasp of what are inelegantly phrased as "moral bottom lines."
The listening public attribute to Keating an objective greatness that they are sure is rejoiced in by his professional colleagues. "It must be great to be on the faculty with a man like that." That popular enthusiasm, of course, gets into the press, which regularly refers to Keating as "the university's great political scientist." Public and media simply have no way of knowing that Keating has never, in person or writing, spoken to political scientists, and that political scientists have never heard of him. A faculty friend of mine once said to another colleague, a distinguished scientist, "But these people in the city, the Keating-worshipers - they have no idea at all who our really good professionals are." My friend said that the scientist replied, "But it is better that way." Perhaps he meant that genuine intellectual merit does not lead to popular esteem. Or that the meritorious are saved from the perils of adulation. (Of course, that stance can be dangerous too. One may fall into the Byronic pose, "I have not loved the world, nor the world me," and regard this as proof of unique quality.)

III

It is one thing to admit one's reservations about the Keating type who evokes worship for his personality and leads innocents to suppose that excited response to charisma improves upon an orderly process of learning, unspectacular and even grinding as this sometimes has to be. One seeks a catharsis for professional dismay. But after acknowledging annoyance, one can look at the scene again and try to understand why it is as it is. One may perceive the falseness of Dead Poets Society and yet be aware of, and wonder about, the admiration it excites. To many moviegoers Keating has seemed a true hero. Numerous students, including some of my own grandchildren, are Keating-worshipers. We might simply say that too many people are susceptible to the pied piperism of a charmer who feels undervalued by the system. But it is also possible that Keating-worship has a social use of some kind and hence signifies something less negative than defective taste and uncritical acceptance of cinematic herohood.
In the academic world and in the larger community there are standard ways of feeling about corporate or institutional life. We live, of course, in an indispensable "system" or organizational structure, and no one except anarchists questions its indispensability. Yet a great many people, perhaps even most of the people some of the time, are suspicious of it, complain about it, distrust it. "School spirit" - that is, conformism with enthusiasm - evokes, now and then and here and there, a certain fear that such belonging is simply serving someone else's ends. These doubts come out of the romantic temper, which always goes for private insights seen in conflict with mass myopia (and tends to ignore the extent to which the seer's ego or psychological self-interest may skew his seeing), and which characteristically regards the necessary system as unresponsive or hidebound or downright devious. Keating provides an outlet for these suspicions: in him the public sees an apparently knowledgeable insider publicly voicing complaints that appear to validate the usual suspicions. The point here, of course, is not whether or to what extent the suspicions are justified (the makers of Dead Poets Society try to justify them by offering, as the real thing, a dated and incredible headmaster and a ludicrous literary doctrine that the school allegedly takes seriously), but simply that the suspicions exist. They exist because of the romantic cast of mind, or, more precisely, a specific mode of the romantic - that is, the melodramatic sense of reality. The melodramatic spirit uses the attack mode: it always sees accepted ends threatened by stupid, ossified, or self-seeking forces that can be identified and hence eliminated.
The actual knowledge generating the attack may be limited or inaccurate; the students who respond to Keatings do not know whether the university, and the world generally, are as marked by ineptitudes, deficiencies, and misdirections as the Keatings declare. But they trust Keating because he voices or embodies their suspicions that all is not well in the management of institutions and societies generally. This is not to say that all is well; it is rather to say that the sense that all is not well reflects less an objective institutional situation than the cast of mind that I have called melodramatic.
We are dealing with a kind of social reality: not so much the evil suspected as the act of suspecting it, a psychological impulse in Keating's audience. Keating may tease this audience into some symbolic spectaculars (as he did with the boys in Dead Poets Society); but, by and large, he prefers the role of "J'accuse," which thrills both actor and audience. If he calls for actual revolt, he is pretty likely to pick on a straw man; in the film, for instance, he has the boys tear out of their textbook a passage that was out-of-date, and indeed unimaginable, long before the time depicted. His role is not actual revolt, which may be burdensome and painful, but the much more comfortable and symbolic revolt that validates his audience's prior sense of flaws in the system. They gain a sense of possessing truth, but without serious cost. In fact, Keating may even manage his "J’accuse" rather indirectly: by a style which implies that all other styles are inferior, by a personal touch that devalues all the rest of the institutional procedures. Keating's students revolt only by conversion to the style of the guru, and often by deifying him.
The men and women who really shape and maintain the institution - by professional discourse with colleagues in the larger world and by steady, systematic instruction at home - do not warm up much to the Keatings. But the final picture is a little less simple than it may appear up to this point. It contains an irony that may even be mildly surprising. For the Keatings of the world, one comes to see, are of a certain kind of institutional benefit. Not that they in any way change things, for they do not. Rather, what they accomplish is this: if on the one hand they gratify the students' sense that something is wrong with the situation, on the other hand they convince the students that here is a force for excellence that counterbalances the failures and may even in time triumph over them. One Great Teacher, as it were, redeems the place otherwise thought to be too much in the hands of routinists and dullards often asserted to be indifferent to student interests and needs. The Keating dissonance becomes a symbol that all is, if not well, at least not lost.
Thus, Keating acts as a kind of safety valve for discontents, suspicions, and negative judgments that could be disruptive without being productive. What is more, Keatings may indeed serve to attract subversive emotion that might otherwise be kidnapped by true moral desperadoes with programs. Organized leftists operate wholly within the melodramatic sense of a good versus evil world, which I have identified as an element in the American sensibility: the naive leftists believe it, and the activist plotters count upon it and use it. In the 1960s the latter, bent upon disruption as a route to destruction, wanted to close down the universities. This might lead to an anarchy in which force could take over. I have some evidence to go on as I surmise, and would even bet, that the Keatings joined the mainstream in resisting closure. Obviously they were not going to surrender a platform and stage important to their own being, and encourage a dictatorship in which they would not be tolerated. Motive aside, the anti-closure stance was a force for the better against the worse option.

IV

Another irony: the Keating who is hardly a hero to his colleagues, though a shining figure to students and in the non-academic world, may unconsciously serve the university whose shortcomings, along with those of society, he is always implying or voicing. The outside community has for the most part few means of judging either the university or Keating's status within it. Hence his apparent omniscience and keen judgment of the world seem convincing evidence of his professional distinction and even of the university's quality. Just as a platform man, he is welcome in the city. He is asked often and is always available. He talks easily, as many of his colleagues do not. They rarely make effective public figures, whether from shyness, discomfort with a lay public, immersion in fundamental professional activities, or at times, no doubt, an unfortunate snobbery about a "popular" audience. Hence public gratitude for, and admiration of, one who relishes the public podium; his skill as a speaker creates a pleasurable aesthetic experience for his audiences.
But in addition to this technical skill, he is a natural candidate for herohood in a world glad to have heroes and rarely finding them in academic circles. He always wears the white hat; no doubt at times he seems a solitary voice against the evils of the world. Yet "solitary voice" implies an eye for unacknowledged evils, a willingness to give pain even to an enthusiastic audience, as if he were probing for consciences unknowingly willing to be stirred. Actually Keatings, as I observe them, do not seriously risk arousing major self-awareness, and hence possible resentment, in their audiences. A Keating seems to have an instinct for what one might call acceptable targets. He is far more likely, for instance, to censure South African whites than to point to local shortcomings in the treatment of minorities. He will be harder on national policy than on tough regional cases. Be that as it may, he sounds heroic, and in time he becomes a university star. If he points to shortcomings in the university administration, his very membership in the university makes it seem a better place. It maintains him, the voice of every man's discontent with institutions. Thus he may help generate, ironically, emotional support for it and also, perhaps, even material support.
"Support." In a day when the standard sources of income - state budgets for public universities, and alumni-provided endowments for private ones - seem increasingly inadequate, an educational institution has to call more and more upon a public with which it may have few obvious connections and upon which it may have fewer incontrovertible claims. Of course the university may argue, and usually does, its concrete benefits to its home area - city, state, region - and indeed to other areas in which a consenting public, according to surveys, may be assumed to exist. The approach is by now familiar: a flock of our MBAs have turned various businesses into multi-million-dollar affairs, and our medical-school inventors have come up with various machines and miracle drugs to make life longer (if not happier). But few fields of study can make such claims; and the general public is little interested in the intellectual life that is the nominal raison d'être of the university (unless the intellectual life has striking visible accompaniments, as in space science, seismology, etc.). Hence the institution is considerably dependent upon irrational goodwill. I suggest that, ironically, some of the goodwill is generated by the Keatings, who manage to voice everyone's vague discontents with life (especially the suspicion that these are owing mainly to institutional imperfections) and at the same time to symbolize the forces that can make things better. The Keatings speak for causes that have appeal, and they put the finger on villains, mostly standard villains rather than figures held high in public esteem.
What I am getting at is a fascinating paradox: the irrational sources of support for institutions nominally devoted to the rational understanding of human experience. There are, of course, rational or apparently rational sources of support - awareness of the need for education, perceived indebtedness for one's own education, and of course Tax Deduction Science - ones that hardly need our attention. But we are quite likely not to notice the irrational sources of support, aspects of institutional life that somehow stir uncritical admiration in the wide outer world. The Keatings of the world apparently have this effect. And then there is a delightful irony: football has the same effect, exciting the emotions that generate support.
Even Keatings sometimes join the public for which football status is a significant indicator of an institutional worthiness that demands support. Only very old universities seem to escape this value judgment; their long life means an adequate mass of big-name alumni to "excite the emotions that generate support." Even in that world, however, too many football defeats may make old boys restive, as if alma mater were slipping in the performance of some significant household rite. But in the great parvenu world of state universities, where I have taught for a lifetime, decent football is, in the public eye, an indispensable symbol of membership in the institutional elect. A winning season is a Nobel or two for hoi polloi, who thus feel stirred to support laboratories and even libraries. A state university president once told me that in the year after his university's team made a rare appearance in a major bowl, the unrestricted contributions to the university reached new heights. (Indeed, aside from symbolizing institutional excellence by its success, football may guarantee institutional health by its presence. In a story that has traveled widely on the university gossip circuit, a University of Chicago president says, "We must get football back, or we'll have all the kooks in the country here." - One hopes that the story belongs to the canon rather than the apocrypha.)

V

This is not the place for a history of irrational motivations that inspire support for institutions formally committed to a rational understanding of life, or for exploring the theoretical issue of whether true good can come out of the constant pointing to naughtiness. I do no more than suggest an ironic reality: the institutional malcontent as somehow guarantor to the public that the forces of truth are strong in the institution, or the maverick as the unintentional assistant in the promotion of the order that makes him a maverick. He satisfies a need for heroes, a role that the true scholar hardly aspires to, and for which the true intellectual would generally be but an ungainly aspirant. The maverick's charisma as dart thrower makes him seem a utopian seer. Fortunately he does not have a program; if he did, he would become a menace, probably Marxist.
As a performer, he prefers role to program, attitude to the complexities of understanding. As Great Teacher, he may crop up even in places able to survive without much football glory. Though attracted, as I have noted, to the Promethean role, he occasionally likes to toss Jovian thunderbolts. He tends to latch on to approved targets: recently he has been tossing harpoons at the Great White Male evil. As a teacher in the humanities, I must acknowledge that he is usually one of us, a teacher of English, or of the softer social sciences; he rarely comes out of mathematics or the sterner sciences, which are less conducive to editorial and theatrical spectaculars by white hats.
But I have been meaning to do him justice, to define his utility. I cannot forget the glowing response of the cinema audience, and subsequently, to descend to the personal, of my grandchildren, two sets of them. When Dead Poets Society came up for discussion at family dinners, I plunged in without first testing the waters. I held forth on how it was immoral when the teacher became greater than the thing taught, living in the adulation of innocent youngsters. One set of grandchildren ordered me to leave the table. The other set, more mindful of the infirmities of age, sentenced me only to loss of dessert. When I tried to pull myself together, in later postmortem reflection, I decided that my punishment was a small price to pay for the knowledge that my descendants would all support their various colleges, happy in the certainty that on each campus the local Keating would, by presence and voice, guarantee that truth had a foothold amid institutional apathy and sinuosity.

Reprinted from The American Scholar, Volume 60, No. 3, Summer 1991. Copyright © 1991 by the author.