Summary of DPS.
There was a clear clash between the traditional and conservative values espoused by Welton Academy as an institution, and the progressive teaching methods of John Keating. Welton Academy’s ethos of “tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence not only discourages but makes it a crime for a student to exercise a critical political consciousness. Professor John Keating, on the other hand, is concerned with the political and moral quality of his students. He challenges them to question the social and political norms that defines their lives at Welton. As a result, he inspires Charlie to publish an article in the school newspaper, arguing for why Welton should be coeducational. In the end, Headmaster Gale Nolan, was so unwilling to even consider the possibility that Neil Perry’s suicide was a product of the intellectually and political repressive atmosphere at Welton, that he compelled every member of the Dead Poet’s Society on threat of expulsion to sign a form stating that Keating’s “destructive” teaching method was the true culprit. By the end of the film, it was clear that what transpires at Welton Academy is not true learning, but rather an insidious form of social and political control in which the dynamics of the dominant, established society, as exemplified by Neil’s father’s suppression of his son’s desire to pursue acting, reproduce themselves in the classroom. In this type of society, children are treated as mere objects or tabulae rasae, without feelings, without desires, without willpower, without dignity, without knowledge. They are to remain docile, unthinking, predetermined automatons subject to the moldings of wiser adults who are the creators, possessors, and dispensers of all necessary knowledge. They are the passive receptacles of information, the Oppressed, in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of The Oppressed. They are the sufferers of Welton Academy’s most hateful and repressive representation of Freire’s “Banking” method of education. While