The very heart of Star Trek is education.
On September 8, 1966, the fabric of American fiction changed when a television series called Star Trek premiered. From the relatively humble beginnings of a tv show that was canceled not once, but twice, a major American entertainment franchise was spawned – a franchise that continues to this very day as new iterations of Star Trek hit bookshelves and screens each-and-every-year.
So very much has been written about Star Trek. It seems that the phenomenon has been scrutinized from every conceivable angle. I should know. I have been trying to develop a book idea about Star Trek for years and each time I think I have found a clever way in, I discover that someone has already gone out into that particular final frontier. Someday I will crack it.
That coming project may have something to do with the fact that education is so critical to Star Trek.
The very heart of Star Trek is education. The mission of Starfleet itself is to explore, to seek out, to go. The various crews of the various starships that populate the universe are often “sciencing” themselves out of difficulties or relying on knowledge to understand another culture or are employing diplomacy to extricate themselves from a challenging situation. These are educated people at the tops of their fields, seeking to learn and to grow.
From its earliest episode, and I mean the first (well, not really the first*) one, the intrepid man of action, Captain Kirk himself, is revealed to have been a teacher before he took command of a starship. Of Kirk, his best friend Gary Mitchell notes that he was told: “Be careful of Lieutenant Kirk. In his class, you either think or sink.”
It is something of a throwaway line, but I just love the fact that one of my all time favorite characters was a teacher before he was anything else. He was a good one. A demanding one. A memorable one.
That the original crew of the Starship Enterprise were my fictional role models growing up may well have led me to my vocation in teaching. That Captain Kirk himself was a teacher may have been an inspiration that altered the course of my life.
Fascinating.
* The actual first episode of Star Trek was the unused pilot The Cage, starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike. It was in the second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, that Mitchell uttered these lines about Captain Kirk and, even then, Where No Man Has Gone Before was not the first episode of the series to air. That honor goes to The Man Trap, an “creature of the week” adventure that NBC executives thought represented the show better than Where No Man Has Gone Before. And all of this I know off the top of my head. Maybe I need to get cracking on that Star Trek project!