INSIDE DOUGLAS COLLEGE / DECEMBER 19, 1989
SOONG APE USS Ro GSR aE,

David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” (1950), C.
Wright Mills’s “White Collar” (1951), Sloan Wilson's
“The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” (1955) and William
Whyte’s “The Organization Man” (1956) anticipated a
1960s anxiety, the suffocation of individuality by social
structures and pressures. In “Dead Poets Society”
these pressures are incarnate in a thin-lipped father
practicing parental fascism and hounding his son to
Hell and Harvard Medical School.

There was in the ‘50s an unhealthy concern with
producing “well-adjusted” (to what?) adolescents so
“well-rounded” they had no edges. Keating is an
admirable sort of ‘50s figure, an intellectual eager to
carve edges or prevent them from being abraded by the
rasp of a dull school. However, he is not a harbinger of
the 1960s, not a politicized academic. His politics (and,
for all I know, Robin Williams’s) may be part
Nietzsche, part Pogo. The power of his personality is
in the purity of his conviction that literature, the high
mountain pass leading to passionate understanding, is
so large and absorbing it leaves no time for lesser,
supposedly more “relevant” (to what?) matters.

Hollywood has an almost unconquerable itch for
moral black and white, and this movie has a two-hanky
ending that manipulates emotions too mechanically.
But at the core of the movie is a flinty, unsentimental
message: the wildness of life can be dangerously wild.
Creativity can have painful costs that must be paid in
the coin of personal, family, and social stresses.

Speaking of stress, while waiting for September do
note that Keating tells the boys they may address him
either as Mr. Keating or O Captain! my Captain! (from
Whitman’s poem about Lincoln’s death). This summer,
answer your children only when so addressed. It will
work wonders for your morale, the tone of your
household, and the caliber of the long days until Labor
Day.

 

 

George F. Will, Columnist

From NEWSWEEK, July 3, 1989, © 1989, Newsweek,
Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

%

 

Suanne D. Houeche, Editor

October 20, 1989, Vol. XI, No. 24 INNOVATION ABSTRACTS js a publication of the Nabonal Institute for Staff and oe Development (NISOD),
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