Film loves unconventional teachers, just as TV has the hots for unconventional cops, but no prof was ever more inspirational than John Keating (Robin Williams on Prozac and seeming almost human). Keating bounds into the life of Welton, a stuffy New England prep school, and liberates the boys from their stuffy parents, their stuffy careers - not to mention the stuffy subjects they’re supposed to be studying.

So tell me, how does one become an inspirational teacher?

It is a cinch. First get your class to tear up their textbooks, then get them to stand on their desks so they get “a new perspective” on life. Finally, get them to quote Walt Whitman very loudly. You will immediately see the painfully shy gaining confidence, the loveless finding hope, and those who suffer domineering parents becoming actors.

And that is all it takes?

Well, Keating does dress it up somewhat by regaling his coterie of seven sycophants with tales of the Dead Poets Society to which he once belonged. The guys duly recreate DPS in homage to their master, because truly what Keating is teaching them is not to love their subject but to love Keating.

Ahah!

For this is always the problem with teachers who throw away the rule book. It is all about ego. “Carpe diem, lads! Seize the day! Make your lives extraordinary!” yells Keating. “Suck all the marrow out of life and let it drip from your tongues like honey.” And, in case his boys still haven’t got the message, Keating throws in the fact that poetry is great for chatting up girls.

Doesn’t the head have anything to say about this arrogant, sentimental and incoherent egomaniac?

Unfortunately, the film is loaded against Dr Nolan who is played as a humourless fossil who makes the school’s lofty ideals - “tradition, honour, discipline and excellence” - read like a death sentence.

So, Keating gets away with his desktop methods?

Well, he would do, except that one member of his liberated band of poets commits suicide. Too much marrow on the chin.

Oh. And Keating gets the blame?

Denounced as reckless by one of the coterie, just as in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

And do the boys protest?

They do. They stand on their desks.

And does this achieve anything?

Of course not. Let’s face it, if unconventional teaching methods actually worked, we would all be unconventional.