"Use Star Wars as a metaphor for education and explain how it works."

All I can think of is the Rebellion fighting opression is like schools fighting prejudices both in hopes of a better society but then schools perpetuate as many of the racial, economic, social problems as they try to fix...
Or maybe the Jedi Code and its focus on compassion and the Force aka Knowledge and how schools try to teach kids to use knowledge of the world to help others and to have compassion...

What do you guys think??? Am I completely off my rocker? Am I making sense? And most importantly will people that have never seen the movies understand what I'm saying with these??? (If it helps this is for a curriculum theory class at the graduate level).

Thanks so much everyone!

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Hmmm... the Jedi/compassion thing sounds good to me, but take it a step further. How about something along the lines of Star Wars is all about jedi, and jedi are all about doing what is beneficial to the the group, the whole. Compassion is merely a part of it; they act in entirely non-compassionate ways when necessary, believe it!

That is the basic tenet of the Light Side, which in turn is a metaphor for society, I think. The Dark Siders aka evil are all about self, the one, anti-group, anti-social. Nasty canastas.

Via education we strive to uplift our children from the selfish egotistical morass of self-indulgence. We hope to teach them not only how to achieve personal success, but to realize that they can still achieve that success even while not losing focus of what is good for the group. In fact, most successful people are successful because what they do IS good for the group.

The bad guys don't think like that. Like Palpatine who wants it all to himself, they possess a "me me mine mine blah blah" mentality.

Kinda like wolves in the fold. Not that I'm saying people are sheep... but then, in many ways we are. We live in societal groups, we hope for a peaceful existence... but we do have our rams, so don't think we're wusses!

OK, I'm rambling, it's late and I had a long lab tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning I can take off fresh on this subject, but for now, that is all I can muster.

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Schools/education in general provide teachings regarding the ideal state of community living. ("Learn from your mistakes" -- does this really happen? Ever? We'd like to think so, but then I suppose one must ADMIT TO HAVE MADE A MISTAKE in the first place, and then it's the "well, YOU made it, WE didn't, so count us out!" sort of thing....) When you step back and study this against the Bigger Picture, you'll see that (outside of the sciences, which deal in hard, cold facts that people just don't seem to like much) you'll see education as being very idealistic. Every undergrad I've ever known is simply sopping with it.

Then here comes real life... wham. Hello reality (hard, cold facts???), goodbye idealism.

Kinda like the idealistic-Good aka Jedi Code versus the nasty, factual Bad "hey, this is reality" of the dark side.

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