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Walker Percy's The Loss of Creature

When I read the essay, I was reminded of one of the opening scenes from the movie "Dead Poets Society" in which the students from a prep school are introduced to their new English teacher, Mr. Keating. According to an essay published online on the Peter Weir Cave website, a student is asked by Mr. Keating to read aloud from an introduction to poetry book in which the author describes the manner in which poetry can be appreciated using a graph which plots "perfection" on one axis and "importance of the poem" on another axis with the total area of the poem measuring its "greatness." Mr. Keating pronounces the author's analysis of poetry and his methodology for evaluating a poem's greatness as "excrement." Mr. Keating's goal is to teach the boys to think for themselves. I recall that in a later scene, Mr. Keating is eating with one of the other teachers who questions Keating's instruction to rip out the introduction to the poetry book. The other teacher describes Keating's actions as misguided and warns Keating against encouraging young men to become freethinkers (Dead Poets Society: Final Script).

In his essay "The Loss of the Creature," Walter Percy laments the manner in which education is distorting students' perceptions about the goal of education. Percy argues that by regimentation and standardizing curriculum, both teachers and students are damaged. According to Percy, the education experience can be likened to a packaged tour in which everything that will be seen, done, heard, and learned will be scripted in advance by and for the instructor/tour guide. This means that there is no opportunity for creativity or deep appreciation for the subject matter whether it is biology or poetry. As a result, students receive a superficial and inadequate education which might be described as providing a broad but not deep understanding of any particular subject.

It is difficult for me to evaluate

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Walker Percy's The Loss of Creature. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:04, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2000003.html