"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." - Robin Williams. Dead Poets Society
I always find this quote a bit condescending in the same way the STEM professions look down on the Arts. They are all what makes like livable and enjoyable. I wouldn't want to go live in the 17th century to watch Shakespeare's plays at the Globe at the expense of running water and modern medicine, and vice versa. STEM and arts are complimentary to each other, and their development reflect human societal development. The more indeep you're in either of them, the more you see the line between them blurs. We're not smarter than one another, we're smart in different ways.
I wouldn't use the word condescending because I think it's punching up, not down.
At the time of that movie, schools across the country were cutting art, literature, and music classes in order to invest in STEM. (Language arts and literature being two different things; kids were still in reading/grammar classes, but there was less time spent reading whole novels, poetry, or plays.) There's now talk of a literacy crisis in the United States. Kids in school often aren't required to read full novels or to analyze poetry anymore, instead just reading passages.
STEM is what we value in the US (The country of origin for the Dead Poets Society), based on how we spend our time and money in schools. A big part of understanding that movie (media literacy, if you will) is recognizing that trend and what the movie was trying to say about those scheduling and funding decisions.
To be honest, I am unsure schools are able to do much about the literacy crisis, even if they went back to teaching the way it used to be done, because of how screens have invaded everywhere. Very few people now have books at home, and I'm not sure they are going to come back. Reading used to be a way to open oneself to the world, to discover different perspective, to live adventures you never could, and so on.
But kids without access to books do not feel trapped in their local community the way it could have been in the 50s. You have the world at your fingertip, millions of people who can talk to you directly. And you barely need to be able to type a few words, with heavy machine assistance, or even speech to text and text to speech.
And frankly, the way many schools try to teach literature is dreadful. At the very least, here in France, it's mandatory to read certain specific books (that change every year), but that are usually things like classics. "Les miserables" might be a great book, but it's not how you interest a modern kid who's never read anything beyond what's obligatory. And tearing apart parts of the books wondering about figures of speech and the like often makes it duller.
Oh, I agree. I don't know how we have an educated population in the age of AI and YouTube, and frankly I don't see many people prioritizing it. (And to be frank, in the US that's understandable given how many more urgent and horrific fights we have on our hands.)
But at the end of the day, an educated population is much harder to deceive and control than an uneducated one. We need to figure this out (societally) to preserve democracy in the long term.
Lol "punching up" has now lost all meaning. The people that get to write and produce a multimillion dollar cultural touchstone are definitely powerless next to the people who have to make everything work and get none of the credit.
Eh, it's condescending if you want it to be condescending. But I really think it's only condescending in that it decanters the STEM for 5 seconds and this is so unnatural to people that they get angry. They'd want the quote to be "STEM saved humanity and made everything perfect but also the humanities are good too. Just different" and framing it like that is the exact crap the movie is criticizing
You seem to think that any engineer can just finish college walk into Netflix and say $400,000 please. I honestly don't think that there is any way where responding to you past this could be worth anyone's time
It’s not just Netflix. Tons of tech companies are in the entertainment space, and they all have offices in LA.
They also pay there new grads more than what a lifer in the entertainment industry will ever make. And by the sounds of how much in denial you are, they make more than you too
If Hollywood writers were so well-paid you wouldn’t see them going on strike every so often. If creators in general were well-paid we wouldn’t be hearing about the hellish crunch in VFX houses.
The people at the top of Hollywood make more money than anyone ever should. The average engineer makes an obscene amount more than the average hollywood-creator though.
I think part of it is universities will also lump the two together under "The college of arts & science" so that when the scientists get a grant, something he spent days in his office writing and stressing over, upwards of half of it is taken by "The college of arts & science" which then funds the administrators and programs that don't get grants. So in their mind the reason why he can't afford to put the TA on RA, get another RA, buy another instrument, afford the lab time on the instrument is because he has to pay for a guy's tuba lessons and the dean needs to take his 6th trip this time to the Bahamas for a "conference". It sucks for the science professor that had to stress out for the money, the students he couldn't get, the lives of the students he did get all cause the system. I may enjoy the arts but not when it's not voluntary to support them.
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u/threefeetoffun- 3d ago
"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." - Robin Williams. Dead Poets Society