Robin Williams in  Dead Poets Society

The 10 best teachers

School’s back in, so sharpen your pencils and study our list of eminent educators, from the inspirational to the irredeemable. No sniggering at the back

Stuart Husband
Sunday 6 September 2015 07.00 BST

1 | Mr Keating

from Dead Poets Society

One of the late Robin Williams’s most affecting and less mawkish studies in child-men (of which Patch Adams remains the acknowledged nadir), John Keating is the quintessential inspirational English teacher who shakes up his charges at a buttoned-up late-50s Ivy League-style academy by having them rip out the introductions to their poetry primers and clamber on their desks to “sing the body electric”, while he exhorts them to “seize the day boys, carpe diem, make your lives extraordinary”. “Middlebrow high-mindedness,” harrumphed Pauline Kael, but it left a generation of men unable to hear the words “O captain, my captain” without finding that they had, you know, something in their eye.