John Keatings and the prep school in Dead Poet's Society: Where do they fit in the philosophies of education?

John Keatings is, if not anything else, an original thinker and teacher in Dead Poet's Society. The film does not at all bother to hide this fact even in the opening sequences: Keatings is shown as different from the other teachers even by virtue of his grimaces and squeamishness.

John Locke wrote of education, "Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered." John Keatings believes in this Lockian principle, but only to a certain degree. In his classroom, Keatings stressed virtue: He taught his students how to live and feel and treat one another as much as he taught them to classics. In fact, he deliberately skips the theoretical works in the class -- even having his students...
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