Potemkin State

My attention was recently and unexpectedly caught by the barrage of ads for a movie coming out. It seems to be perfect (maybe too close to home?) for youth of a certain age at this point in the late summer.

Plot summary: Kid fails to get into any colleges. Kid and slacker friends create a fictitious school, complete with Lewis Black as dean. Hilarity ensues.

Leaving aside the requisite suspensions of disbelief (for starters, the conceit that a bunch of otherwise unmotivated students could stick with any concerted effort, duplicitous or no, of such magnitude), the kernel idea appeals to me. At that tender age I was dreaming up the ideal interdisciplinary research institute for answering the great questions of human existence--or, more precisely, the cool-ass architecture to house such a beast. It occurred to me later that the ideal location would in fact be the n-dimensional space of the internet, so my dream remains simmering on the far back burner.

Now I've been a student a long time, in varied venues and surrounded by a broad range of people. I've known plenty of students who, faced with conjugating irregular French verbs or following a bill through Congress, acted as though they were wearing leg irons and orange jumpsuits. (That some of them have indeed ended up in such a get-up is a running bad joke between me and my mom.)

Yet some of those same students whose stomachs turned inside-out at the thought of two extra years of pointless post-secondary bullshit just to get a technical certificate manifested insatiable curiosity, self-direction, and limitless enthusiasm about something: mastering an instrument; resurrecting a junker car; reaching peak physical condition, and helping others do the same; designing clothes; reading (even writing) graphic novels. But these were predominantly pursued outside the classroom, beyond the reach of scholastic gatekeeping and shepherding.

This experience is what makes me think "Accepted" will start out promising and quickly become formulaic, divorced from real life--as early reviews seem to hint. Nevertheless there are some sociological verities in this idea that I wouldn't have guessed held true until spending this last school year basically full-time as an instructor in a decent four-year college.

That the rebellion against a cult of collegiate expectations takes the form of the very thing these kids can't attain and perhaps don't want is not fuzzy-headed scriptwriting. I think it's a reflection, on a screen darkly, of just how much we as a society are steering every student toward only certain kinds of post-secondary education.

I will expand this point in a subsequent post, and will try not to come off as overly elitist. If you really want elitism, meditate on just how many people - trivia buffs, college students, even my PhD-possessing peer group - would recognize the czarist allusion in this post title...

A parting thought from the Dean:

"...from behind me, a young woman of 25 uttered the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. (That was until Dan Quayle was elected the vice president and things took a turn.) She said 'If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.'
I'll repeat that. I'll repeat that because that's the kind of sentence that when your brain hears it, it comes to a screeching halt. And the left-hand side of the brain looks at the right-hand side of the brain and says, 'It's dark in here, and we may die!'
She said, 'If it weren't for my horse,' -- giddyup giddyup, let's go -- 'I wouldn't have spent that year in college' -- which is a degree-granting institution.
Don't, DON'T think about that for more than three minutes or blood will shoot out of your nose."