Education In The ‘Star Wars’ Galaxy
Image Source: Wookieepedia
Education is an important part of life, and the same is true in Star Wars. But there are also some interesting quirks of Star Wars that mean education is usually represented in certain ways or, in some cases, not represented. Today at CultureSlate, we analyze the ways education is shown off in the galaxy far, far away.
Regular Schools
Image Source: StarWars.com
Traces of grade, middle, and secondary school-level education abound in Star Wars, but rarely is it the focus. We know many characters have to have received an education, and yet we rarely get a look at this part of Star Wars society. Two of the resources to go into any detail are the novel Force Collector and the recently completed Star Wars: Skeleton Crew on Disney+.
Force Collector’s school, which main character Karr Nuq Sin attends on his homeworld of Merokia, is incredibly familiar. It has different types of classes, it has Star Wars equivalents to school lab equipment in its science classroom, and many other features.
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Image Source: Wookieepedia
The same familiarity can be observed in At Attin Middle School Gamma, where we can see lockers, classroom desks, a large gymnasium, and school uniforms. Perhaps the reason why we haven’t seen many schools like these in Star Wars is because they are difficult to make exciting or inject with the traits that many view as essential to Star Wars storytelling. Skeleton Crew certainly has and perhaps this will herald the inclusion of such settings into other stories.
There is one unique type of regular schooling environment that we’ve seen in Star Wars, particularly recently, and that is the “frontier schoolhouse” with a singular room, and a class with students of varying ages all learning together. We see this on Nevarro in The Mandalorian, and we get a mention of a likely very similar school in Mos Pelgo, also known as Freetown. These structures are purposeful mirrors to the same one-room schoolhouses known from the Wild West and other frontier settings, where kids would go to learn basic skills, and are often sites of tension over matters of education. Its appearances and mentions in The Mandalorian are almost certainly attributable to the strong Western inspiration in the show, and hopefully, we get more examples of these schoolhouses in other areas of Star Wars.
Elite And Military Academies
Image Source: Wookieepedia
The far more common sort of education we see in Star Wars is that taking place at elite institutions or military academies. This is mainly down to the settings and focuses of Star Wars storytelling, as in a world where military conflict has been a main driver of stories and many main characters are exceptional or notable people, showing the training of the individuals involved makes a lot of sense. The Galactic Empire is an especially rich source for many of these stories, in novels like Lost Stars or with the Imperial Academy on Lothal, seen in Season 1 of Star Wars Rebels.
Image Source: Wookieepedia
But many stories also focus on politics, and for children or young adults, that often means private institutions or elite schools where they are taught in all the best ways money or status can buy. In The Clone Wars, the Season 3 episode The Academy sees Ahsoka Tano as an instructor at the Royal Academy of Government on Mandalore, where students include Duchess Satine’s nephew Korkie and a cast of other characters, who are named as cadets and are being taught how to be the future leaders of Mandalorian government.
Another avenue these sorts of institutions are explored through is odd-man-out narratives where people of exceptional skills but from unassuming backgrounds (and in the case of the Galactic Empire, often Outer Rim backgrounds) must face the difficulties of integrating with a group of peers who look down on them. This is scattered across stories in Star Wars, such as in the novel Tarkin when Wilhuff Tarkin recalls his difficulty integrating into the student body at the Sullust Sector Spacefarers Academy, or in Thrawn, where Thrawn and Eli Vanto have to deal with the negative view many at the Royal Imperial Academy have of them.
Universities And Institutes
Image Source: Wookieepedia
We lack many stories set on the campuses of universities or institutes of higher learning in Star Wars, the mentions being as scant as the regular schooling discussed earlier. They have appeared very prominently around one character though, Doctor Aphra. Throughout both of her comic series, in 2017 and 2020, readers got to explore Aphra’s past with the University of Bar’leth, and her relationship with some other institutions of higher learning like the Shadow University. There is also the more recent character of Beaumont Kin, who appeared in The Rise of Skywalker, and whose background as a former institute academic and archeologist was noted to help Rey with her work in studying the Jedi. Beaumont has also been noted more recently for serving as the in-universe author of Chris Kempshall’s The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire.
Why The Droids?
Image Source: Wookieepedia
One of the more interesting details we have noticed in live-action Star Wars projects regarding to education is the apparent focus on droids as educators for students. Droids have served as tutors and teachers in Star Wars before, and indeed, private tutors are another common method of education we see mentioned by some characters who were part of elite circles growing up, but this is distinctly different. The first example returns us to The Mandalorian and Nevarro, where their school seems to only feature one teacher, an energetic protocol droid. The next example is a bit more of an edge case, in the form of Skeleton Crew’s At Attin and how its teachers appear to all be droids. Now, due to the nature of At Attin, we know that its droid dominance is likely part of the overall social structure feeding back to The Supervisor, but the trend is intriguing.
Some have noted that the presence of a droid teacher, droid prison guards, and a droid counselor across The Mandalorian might rightly imply that in the wake of the Galactic Civil War, the New Republic and many areas of galactic society might be struggling to find qualified candidates for many of these positions. Whether this be due to laws that might limit the job prospects of former members of Imperial institutions, or simply the disruptive effect of the recent conflict is unclear. But if we see more education in The Mandalorian and its associated Mandoverse shows, we might continue to see the presence of droids as educators.
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