Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/-em-dead-poets-society-em-is-a-terrible-defense-of-the-humanities/283853/ The beloved film's portrayal of studying literature is both misleading and deeply seductive. By Kevin Dettmar - FEBRUARY 19, 2014 I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society . I expect that them’s fighting words, at least in some quarters; at least I hope they are. Because I’m trying to pick a fight here. I was in the last year of my English literature Ph.D. program in the summer of 1989, when Dead Poets Society was released . My younger brother Scott, who really didn’t have the money to spare, slipped my wife, Robyn, and me a 10-dollar bill (these were simpler times) and told us he’d watch our kids so we could go out to see it. No one in my family quite understood what I wanted to do for a living or, having finished my bachelor’s degree, why I’d spend seven more years in school to do it; but having seen Dead Poets Society , Scott bel