Community on Television

So we should talk about important things.

One of these important things has to do with the television show Community not receiving any Emmy nominations. Here is a show about a diverse group of students nay friends who make their way through Spanish and anthropology courses in terms of relying on each other as a study group.

The joke, due to the incompetence of the professors teaching the material, has at least to do with the fact that they will not learn Spanish or anthropology in their classes. This may be what is typical at a community college. There is not much in terms of academic learning happening at this particular community college.

The critique of public education as simply satisfying the position where students already find themselves is exemplified in this series. The show does not deal with the important things that go on at a community college which are basically apprenticeships in needed skilled careers required for a productive economy, as well as training in skills that can provide for the needs for one’s own life and family in terms of holding a career in an honorable and albeit remunerative manner.

Instead of welding or the skills and knowledge regarding process technology of working at a refinery, in Community the study group takes Spanish and anthropology. Personally, I can’t wait until they take a Government/Political Science course. Anthropology and Spanish are exotic enough for laughter, but at least government (if it is American Government) will require them to think about their own lives as allegedly self-governing human beings. But then I flatter myself in this thought

This crowd in terms of the study group, each of whom comes from a distinctive and important background, nonetheless establishes a situation whereby they can each and all become friends. I call it a crowd because the study group in the show found themselves entirely arbitrarily. However, once they find themselves as a group, they come to rely on each other. They become friends. The crowd even becomes a group to whom each is willing to make distinctions between insider and outsider. This is shown in a callous and politically incorrect manner when they reject the character Chang from joining their group. But then they cannot deny his presence either. Luckily for him and the audience, Chang remains—let’s hope they don’t make him simply a weirdo caricature.

In the series, no one in this study group truly knows why they are at college other than a notion that they think they must be there. Education is important apparently. They all agree that education is very important even if they don’t know why, and the community college does not give them any reasons why they should seek an education. In their classes, they do not have to read or write. In one episode, the character Shirley comments that they get assigned to make more dioramas than her own fifth grade child. One could say the same thing about any poster board collage or PowerPoint presentation as a mode of student academic assessment. This is an easy joke on community college education, but it is not far from the mark. However, I suspect that fancy four year colleges are not much different these days.

It is the idea of education that simply encourages “creativity” and doesn’t emphasize reading and writing. Self-esteem understood as student-centered education becomes the norm in this way. To be sure, this “creativity” type education is what these students have encountered throughout their lives from K through 12. It seems that nowadays they never knew the teacher who thought the idea of education was to crush the spiritedness of each student through personal humiliation, and if necessary through bodily cruelty. Of course I now say this with a jaunty disinterested sense bordering on gallows humor, but at the time I must admit that such rigidly adamantine education turned me into a punk rocker in the sense that I was willing to question and defy all piety. Nowadays, on the contrary, I would be free to discover my own punk rocker. To me that’s a scary notion.

Luckily I found my sense, and apart from simple age, it also was the result of a good education. Thoughtful educators worth emulating presented everything from Thucydides to Richard Wagner, William Faulkner to W.B Yeats, from Shakespeare to Herodotus. They made me realize how ignorant I was and am still am. Perhaps I was blessed (or cursed) to have such an education beyond a community college education.

Nonetheless, the name of the show—Community—is important. I like this show because it shows the possibility of ways in which one can make friends outside of one’s own idiosyncrasy.

The premise of the show details the ways in which friendship could and can be established in spite of a bureaucratic understanding of education that is inevitably found at our community colleges.

The students in Community—which in many ways are just as lost than the denizens of the desert island of the television series Lost—are trying to make friendships despite themselves. Community is a comedy of levity. It deals with serious issues in a manner that is worthy of further consideration. It is a good show in that it shows needy characters who can overcome their neediness insofar as they have each other.

Of course, they may be shallow regarding accepting familial responsibilities or thinking about the role that one’s obligations to God make for us. Yet, this is only a TV show, and these are only community college students—not to follow George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I have more thought on Community—such as the distinction between the truths that can be learned from Jeff’s real life in contradistinction to Abed’s imaginary life—but I’ll leave that for another post.