With a new school year underway, it’s only a matter of time before another wave of controversy emerges from America’s universities. Such dissension has prompted critics of the education system to call for reform—including a return to a model rooted in the classics, to prepare students for college learning and the real world.
Modern images of classical education are negative and have been shaped in part by films like Dead Poets Society. The movie, starring Robin Williams as the dynamic English teacher John Keating, has been praised for its celebration of individuality. But a less renowned film that aspires to a better model of real-world education is The Emperor’s Club, which features Kevin Kline as classics teacher William Hundert. Released 13 years after Dead Poets Society, it seems to be a carbon copy of its predecessor, lifting a comparable setting, plot, and aesthetic.
Despite these surface-level similarities, a deep, thematic tension exists between the two films, which are both rooted in claims about education and the good life. Dead Poets Society endorses a progressive philosophy that flirts with nihilism, which should seem familiar to even the most casual contemporary observer of higher education. The Emperor’s Club, on the other hand, offers a full-throated defense of classical education.
Viewed alone, The Emperor’s Club makes clear the virtues of the classics; viewed alongside Dead Poets Society, it illuminates the flaws and underlying dangers of the progressive mentality that has laid siege to American education.
To understand these movies, you have to understand their protagonists. Kline’s character of Mr. Hundert makes this incredibly simple, declaring in the voiceover that opens that film, “I am a teacher—simply that.” Mr. Keating does not offer a similar proclamation of his character, but it’s easy enough to nail him down. Whereas Hundert’s classroom is adorned with busts of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, Keating’s features a single portrait of Walt Whitman, staring down from above the blackboard like a Soviet premier. While Hundert quotes Aristophanes, Keating quotes Thoreau—and, in a particularly revealing scene, himself.
Mr. Hundert takes a humble pride in a life spent inculcating virtue in his students. Mr. Keating, on the other hand, is a teacher in name only: He’s less interested in teaching his students than in indoctrinating them in his personal romantic worldview. As the film’s most famous scene shows, he’s downright dismissive of education properly understood, having his students begin their class by tearing up a textbook and declaring the analysis therein to be “excrement.”
Throughout the films, we see the personal philosophies of these men translated into the lessons they teach. To teach a lesson on conformity, Keating brings the boys out to a courtyard and has them walk around. He then observes that, though the boys each began walking at “their own pace,” they quickly fall into each other’s rhythm, marching around in lockstep. Keating tells the boys, “We all have a great need for acceptance. But you must trust that your beliefs are unique … find your own walk.”
Note that Keating is not encouraging his students to grow a moral backbone. He instead is teaching them to resist conformity simply to be a nonconformist. No higher standard is at work here. As long as your belief is unique, it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad—all that matters is that no one else is doing it.
Compare this to the moment when Mr. Hundert stops a young man he sees cutting across the grass. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, he tells the boy to “follow the path … walk where the great men before you have walked.” When the boy nervously agrees, saying, “it’s better for the grass,” Hundert quips back, “it’s better for you.”
Placed side by side, we see that Hundert’s lesson is clearly superior—though Keating’s lesson is far more common. Without any tradition or higher standard to appeal to, Keating cannot, as Hundert does, teach his students to be good. All he can do is assure them that they are special. Without a firm understanding of the good life, all lives become good, so long as they are lived deliberately.
The Emperor’s Club ends some 20 years after its starting point, at a reunion where Mr. Hundert encounters his former students. They seem to attribute their happiness and success in large part to the lessons they learned in his classroom.
We don’t get to see the students of Dead Poets Society as adults, but we can imagine how they turned out. It stands to reason that they would fit in well in our world, dominated as it is by glorified individualism and license, dismissive of traditions that aim at a higher standard. A quick glance at our colleges and universities proves that the John Keatings have beaten out the William Hunderts for the role of educating our citizens, and shaping our national soul. Ours is really a Dead Poets Society, and for that we should be worried.
Fortunately, none of this is a foregone conclusion. To avoid becoming a nation of John Keatings, we should turn back to the classics, and take our first steps down the paths of the great men that came before us. But, if we’re not ready to dive headfirst into Plato’s Republic, there are easier places to start—for instance, watching a film that teaches the right lessons, despite lacking critical acclaim. It’s okay to start slow. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Tim Rice is a policy analyst living in Brooklyn.
