More thoughts on the Enterprise...

One of the big questions that I've been asking myself is, "How could they possibly handle teaching all those different races at once?" I mean, we can barely handle having Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites in the same classroom -- how would we deal with Terrans, Klingons, Vulcans, Binars, and every other race in the Federation? Then I realized that the Star Trek universe isn't really set up to deal with the question of diversity. I mean, is there any planet other than Earth with more than one race of people? Qo'Nos is full of Klingons and noone else, Vulcan has Vulcans, Romulus has Romulans ... there are no hyphenates on any of those planets (i.e., no "Hispanic-Vulcans"). Plus, everybody on those planets seems to believe in the same set of values, have the same culture, follow the same religion (with a few upstarts now and again, but they're the exceptions to the rule) -- every other planet in the Star Trek galaxy is home to a monolithic culture. In fact, even Earth in 24th century seems to have become somewhat singular in its culture. The notion of individual countries no longer exist, there are no states, no nations. There's one elected official who's in charge of Earth. The only evidence that there was ever a culture apart from that of "Terran" is in people's last names (i.e., Picard and Torres) and skin color, and everyone seems to ignore those details for the most part.

The question, I guess, is: what happened to race? How did everything get homogenized? I think the answer lies in Wesley Crusher's last episode. Remember the planet of Native Americans? I wonder if any other cultural group on Earth decided that they'd rather start a colony out in space before surrendering their culture to the Terran ideal. I bet they did. I bet somewhere there's a planet of Africans, a planet of Mexicans, hell, a planet of fucking French people (Picard would consider himself Terran, but have certain leanings towards his ancestral culture -- as long as he lived on Earth, he'd be expected to be part of the Terran cultural group rather than French).

So what does this have to do with education on the Enterprise? Well, it means that school on the Enterprise wouldn't have to worry about teaching multiculturally. In fact, the concept of multicultural education would be a non-sequitur. They would teach Terran-style. And if parents wanted their children to be taught differently, they would send them to the appropriate planet or colony world.

"Education on the Enterprise", then, is actually an outline of the Terran education philosophy rather than some galactic standard. Vulcans would certainly do things differently, as would Klingons (Worf once threatened to send Alexander to a Klingon school), and so on for every other cultural group.