“The new Republican governor of Arkansas, Sarah Sanders, said the move to ban critical race theory in public schools in her state was a preventative measure… ‘Our teachers absolutely need to teach our history,’ Sanders said, ‘but they shouldn’t teach our kids and our students ideas to hate this country and to give a false premise about who we are and what we’re about. And that is something that we have to make sure we protect our students from.’” – The Guardian
I sense a great disturbance in the Force. Cynical academics are attempting to corrupt our society with their inaccurate revisionist history. In order to protect our Padawans from being indoctrinated in the Dark Side’s ideology, the Council has decided to excise certain ugly chapters from the ancient Jedi texts.
The revised curriculum will not cover Order 66, the minor instance in which the Jedi Council misinterpreted a prophecy, chose the wrong chosen one, and allowed the Sith to infiltrate our ranks, which all culminated in Anakin Skywalker murdering the younglings in cold blood and then proceeding to enslave the entire galaxy. This isolated incident does not reflect who we are as a modern society and does not need to be taught to our youth.
We don’t deny that these events took place. Is Anakin Skywalker part of our shared history? Of course he is. Is he the defining element of our saga that continues to inform all of our subsequent actions? Hardly. “Skywalker” is not the only last name in our lore. Teaching Anakin’s failings would only cause the Padawans to question their leaders’ authority and worry that they, too, could be either corrupted or murdered. Which they won’t.
Despite what some have alleged, this is not an attempt at whitewashing our history. Instead, we are striking back against the propagandistic anti-Jedi agenda that permeates academia. These so-called “historians” are fixated on the one moment in history when we could not identify great evil, even when it was in front of our faces, leading to the mass slaughter of our ranks. But what exactly are modern Jedi supposed to learn from this? The days of intergalactic tyranny are long past. The Empire won’t rise again. The Death Star won’t be rebuilt. We’ve learned our lesson already. This critical theory only makes young Jedi feel shame for something they never did.
And this is precisely where the new Empire begins: in our classrooms. Our school systems are building the next generation of mindless Stormtroopers by exposing them to politicized counternarratives, causing them to question accepted history and rethink the infallibility of our great heroes. We need to fight against this totalitarian thought control by imposing our own limits on what ideas and concepts our students are allowed to believe.
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. So let’s prevent our Jedi younglings from encountering any negative portrayals of our history. The Jedi should not be seen as the group that allowed the Empire to rise but as the Rebels who rose to prevent the Empire from ever returning. For a period of time. Instead of highlighting his time as Darth Vader, we will only teach Anakin’s profound redemption, sacrificing himself to defeat Palpatine and prevent the Emperor from ever rising to power again. For a period of time, that is.
Instead of harping on about how the Jedi Knights are “an outdated patriarchal order of white men,” we spend an entire week teaching about Mace Windu, a proud Jedi person of color who proved that the Force does not discriminate. His purple lightsaber blazed a trail for other JPOC, who are always welcome in our world.
The Jedi Code instructs us to avoid attachment. And thanks to this, we are very good at ignoring the undesirable parts of our history. Supreme Leader Snoke. The Holdo Maneuver. Jar Jar Binks? Never existed. Luke becoming a hermit who turned his back on the fight after failing as a teacher? That’s an ugly mischaracterization of a great man. Everything involving Kylo Ren and Rey? Best forgotten. We don’t need these unfortunate outliers in our canon, poisoning our memories of the Golden Age with their moral relativism and realistic depictions of our founding heroes.
The goal of our academy is to forge great leaders, not to create activist, political progressives who tear down the Jedi Order from within. We should be training more students like Grogu. Grogu is quiet, is inoffensive, and doesn’t push us into dark introspective caves that cause us to rethink any of our preconceived notions. We need more Grogus in this world!
This revamped syllabus offers a new hope for the next generation of Jedi. It will inspire our students, protect our legacy, and reaffirm our childhood notions of good and evil. Together, we will write bold new chapters while also clinging to comforting old standards that are too precious to abandon, and we will lash out whenever any outsider attempts to alter our sacred dogma by even the slightest degree.
This is the way.