Dead Poets
In September, 1967, at the age of thirteen, I entered Hebron Academy in Hebron, Maine as a Freshman. Hebron is a school that is 216 years old. We had moved to Poland Spring, Maine in January, 1966. My mother was the Deputy Director of the first Women’s Job Corps Center. She had a Ph.D. in Adult Education and had over twenty years of building and administering programs for the betterment of the lives of women from Upstate New York to Venezuela and Costa Rica. Note that she was not the Director of the new Center, but the Deputy Director. The Director was a retired Army Colonel who had no particular knowledge or capability in educational programs and certainly not in any aspect of training and guiding the development of young women like the 1,200 inner-city underprivileged women who would be descending on the Poland Spring facility to spend one to two years to turn their lives around. This Colonel chose to live in the city of Portland, some 45 minutes away by Thruway. My mother chose to live with us, her family, on the grounds of the facility on the rural hilltop of Poland Spring, Maine. The nearest school was the Poland Community School that handled K-8th, whereupon the students had to go on to the nearest high school in Auburn, sixteen miles away. I spent eighteen months attending Poland Community School and managed through despite the fact that Maine was ranked 49th in the nation in education.
My mother was the first to realize that I would not be well-served continuing in public education in Maine, so she put the idea in my head that I should attend a resident prep school. I took the entrance exam and did well enough to apply to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire (my first choice) and Hebron Academy, fourteen miles from my home in Poland Spring. Exeter didn’t find my do-gooder family story and my questionable schooling (Costa Rica, Wisconsin and then Poland Community School) to be a compelling story to ensure admission. Hebron took pity on my mother and my situation of being the only boy in a household with a mother and two sisters. They were enlightened enough to admit me but not so enlightened that they didn’t find it necessary to tell me to drop twenty pounds by the Fall. My eighth grade teacher somehow learned about this request and made a public announcement to my class that one of the downsides of private education was the need to fit the mold that they liked. I’m not sure which school administration was more unenlightened, but I beelined it to Hebron.
There are several movies about prep school life. The ones at the top of my list are Dead Poets Society, The Emperor’s Club, Scent of a Woman and Taps. Since Taps is set in a military academy that gets taken over by the students, and despite the introduction of Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn and Tom Cruise, it really is less a prep school than a different beast altogether. But each of the other movies are dead wringers for what it was like at Hebron. None of them is more reminiscent of Hebron than the fictional Welton Academy in Dead Poet Society. We just watched the movie for the umpteenth time and enjoyed every minute of it. I like the story and all the performances, especially those of Robin Williams and Ethan Hawke, but what I really like is the fact that almost every character and every aspect of student life at Welton is recognizable to me from my one year at Hebron. That’s right, after a year, we moved to Rome and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to transfer to Notre Dame International Prep in Rome.
But the immersion as a boarder at the young age of thirteen in the life of a prep school student was very formative. The Latin teacher in the film and my Latin teacher at Hebron were exactly the same. The Headmaster, Mr. Nolan, even looked like the Headmaster at Hebron, Mr. Claude Allen, except that, strangely enough, Claude rode a BMW motorcycle of all things. The classrooms, the dining hall protocol, the assemblies and the dormitories at Welton are all eerily similar to those at Hebron. When I watch the movie, I am immediately transported back to south-central Maine and my early adolescence. The coats the boys wear out in the cold with the toggle buttons, the sports coat and ties in class, the institutional-grade mystery meat being served in the dining room and served by the lower-classmen (like me in those days), and the casual time doing anything that seemed stupidly iconoclastic at the time. For me that was shooting off model rockets with another Freshman, trying very hard not to kill ourselves in the process. But most of the memories revolve around the traditions of the school like attending Sunday night Vespers, singing hymns like Jerusalem The Golden.
The methods of the school was the classic approach of breaking down students so they could build us up. The first quarter I got all C’s and D’s and couldn’t understand why. Most of my classmates had similarly bad to mediocre grades to start the year. The comments on the report card were far more extensive than anything I ever got in public school and they seemed to love pointing out all my flaws. Strangely enough, by the spring I had markedly improved in all areas and my grades reflected the improvement. Methinks there might have been some method to this madness.
When I watch Kevin Kline in The Emperor’s Club play the serious Mr. Hundert and pedantically teach his students like Emile Hirsch the importance of history as well as right from wrong, it reminds me of several of my Hebron teachers. I could never figure out who would want to be a prep school teacher. The environment is intentionally strict and the constant conflict with the willfulness of students can’t possibly make the experience all that positive to those teachers. But the calling exists and the molding of young minds goes on for better or worse. I should have seen that in my mother’s dedication to teaching the Job Corps women.
The most impressionable part of Dead Poets Society is the theme that a teacher that teaches students to think for themselves is a powerful force that will stay with students their whole lives. That is also the theme in The Emperor’s Club as well as Scent of a Woman (though it was Al Pacino’s blind Colonel Slade that does the teaching inadvertently). I don’t recall a Mr. Keating or a Mr. Hundert specifically at Hebron, but I know the experience as a whole has stayed with me in a way that tells me that the Dead Poets have had their impact and I can only wish the same on my grandchildren, since my kids are well past their schooling days. Maybe I’ll just have to be a Dead Poet to my kids.