Video Values Education: Star Trek as Modern Myth
Abstract (summary)
Commercial television has become the common school of America in the late twentieth century—the most universal, common experience. As schools have become more multicultural, television has come to fulfill their earlier function of homogenization.
Series drama is the major genre of the television common school. Using a set of functional categories developed from the literature on myth (another form of non-literate education), a content analysis is made of one popular series drama program, (a) to demonstrate its content as being mythic in nature, and therefore as being values education in an analogous way to traditional myth, and (b) to expose some of its values messages—its curriculum.
This analysis reveals Star Trek as presenting a naively unquestioned faith in the values of freedom and progress, and an ambivalent attitude toward equality—in Star Trek everyone is equal, but females, non-whites and non-Americans are, paradoxically, subservient.
Star Trek's value—assumptions reflect the 1950s, yet it was made in the 1960s, and is still showing in the 1980s. A systems model is developed to explain this discrepancy. Because mass television developed in the 1950s, it assumed certain forms; because television has become the common school of American culture, it has gone on to socialize succeeding generations into those same forms, setting up a self-reinforcing feedback loop in favor of the status quo and against change.
The thesis concludes by raising questions about the desirability of allowing private ownership of a medium that functions as the nation's common school.