i just read your post about leia visiting space!university, and i'm happy-screaming. i want ALL the sw-academia headcanons!!
Mostly I’m fascinated with the that Leia doesn’t remember universities, because by the time she was old enough to---know anything about the galaxy, all the old universities had been converted to military academies. They were targeted by the Imperial Security Bureau as “hotbeds of radical republicans” and most of the professors and students who resisted the new regime---or god forbid, protested---were shipped off to prison planets.
Also, as with all my headcanons, it’s very planet-specific---for example, Alderaan doesn’t really have academia-type space, Alderaan has always been more about informal clubs/organizations and open source, direct education. Primary teachers outnumber professors 100-to-1 on Alderaan for this reason, and run the gamut from established schoolteachers to tutors to wandering instructors-for-hire. (Leia had a dizzying number of tutors when she was young, and all the very best, since Breha was Minister of Education before she became Queen, and had opinions about these things.)
Whereas Chandrila had an extremely formal and arcane academic culture, inaccessible to the majority of its inhabitants. It required dedicating upwards of seven years to studying the subject, and the subject alone; even the requirements for application were complex and the process expensive. The fact that Mon Mothma is university-educated means she managed to navigate years of complicated paperwork and ritualized procedures, while also learning some stuff. It makes her....uniquely suited to being a senator, and she will say as much.
Naboo had a long tradition of competing philosophical schools, which generally sprang up around one or two great teachers and were then continued by his or her students. If Padme hadn’t been elected queen---and then senator after that---she likely would have attended one. (There was a lot of fierce competition for her bid, when she announced she was stepping down from the throne. The rumors that she was going to start her own school persisted for years, no matter how many times she insisted she wasn’t interested.)
Luke, like most Outer Rim denizens of his generation, was educated in a virtual classroom, as part of the Empire’s “educational outreach.” (The Empire is a lot of things, but not stupid. They knew that controlling what people learn and how they think was vital to their state-building. It’s why they ran the radicals out in the first place.) Sometimes, you’d get one of the old Core-educated professors passing through Toshe---running from the Empire, more books on their datapad than credits in their account. Generally, one of the local families would offer them food and lodging in exchange for lessons, and the whole community would come together to hear what they had to say.
Luke remembers evenings like that---Beru cooking her special delim for the potluck and Lars dressed in his best clothes; crowding into a room with all the furniture pushed to the walls, everyone talking and laughing like they were at a festival. A tired-looking woman making her way to the center of the room, and the way everyone fell silent to listen---
