Should schools help students think indiviually - Essay Example

The film Dead Poet Society is a film about an English teacher who inspired his about by teaching poetry. The film also showed the differenttype of students and learning on how learning should go about, do we stick to the school curricula to ensure uniformity of learning or do we encourage independent thinking even different from what is thought in the school. The argument was presented in the character of Charlie also known as Nuwanda who was a non-conformist. He does not subscribe to the popular thought and he is not afraid to do anything especially if it will give him attention.

The argument whether school’s should teach uniformity or encourage to think individually was settled in the character of the new teacher Mr. Keating who was unlike other teachers who does not stick to the syllabus whose teaching style is different. He instead use poem and encourage his students take risk even that means breaking rules to make their “lives extraordinary”. He even introduced the idea of Carper Diem of letting the students decide what is good for them. There are two philosophers who encouraged independent thinking – they were Thoreau and Emerson.

Both delved into transcendental philosophy through the exploration of the higher dimension of the self through non-conformity (Emerson) and simplicity (Thoreau). Self-reliance as put forth by Emerson and Thoreau is the independence of the self that does not subscribe to the “foolish consistency [which] is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines” (Emerson) and independence which is free from any unwarranted neediness that enables one to appreciate existence better as articulated by Thoreau.