The Acolyte Ep 6 teaches us about teaching.

Must teachers accept a degree of corruption?

The Short Take:

More questions. More suspicion. We are at the precipice of this series, and I am hoping with all my heart that it can deliver on its central mystery. In the meantime, I’m over here pontificating about teaching. (And I’m thankful for the episode’s prompting of that!)

[SPOILER WARNING: Don’t hop out of the water if you haven’t seen The Acolyte through Episode 6, “Teach/Corrupt.”]

Image Credit: StarWars.com

The Long Take:

Star Wars has a long history of pedagogical discourse. From Yoda famously saying “Do or do not; there is no try” in The Empire Strikes Back or “The greatest teacher, failure is” in The Last Jedi, to Padme comforting Anakin with “Mentors have a way of seeing more of our faults than we’d like. It’s the only way we grow” in Attack of the Clones. Characters constantly try to teach each other and periodically talk to each other about the teaching and learning they’re doing. So many of my Star Wars friends are educators — of all stripes — and I’d like to think that this is part of the unique draw for them and for me. 

The tradition of teaching in Star Wars is in part practical, due to the built-in premise of a Master and a Padawan or Apprentice; the pairing of a student and a teacher, in a bond like no other, is a foundational structure, a building block of both the Jedi and the Sith infrastructure. Plus, learning how to connect with The Force is hard! And therefore requires a teacher. 

The Acolyte, even in its series title is intrinsically interested in this social construct of the student-teacher relationship. This episode specifically is even more so because its title marks the return of the slash constructions with “Teach/Corrupt.” Here is my attempt to connect everything into one unifying theory: the duality of these titles echo the theme of twins or doppelgängers which all leads back to this fundamental structure within the Jedi and Sith cultures: Qimir would call it the Power of Two — master and apprentice or teacher and pupil (or acolyte…there are lot of synonyms flying around and I’m not sure if the use of each one is distinct or not). This episode, we have so many pairings: Mae and Osha, of course, as we have had all along, but now Mae with Sol and Osha with Qimir, and…most notably for the teach/corrupt binary, I think, we have Sol and Qimir as two sides of the teacher coin. 

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Notably, though, this duality of teach/corrupt binary is a lot murkier than ones we’ve had in the past. Lost and found, revenge and justice, and, if we’re coupling the two previous episodes, day and night, are very straightforward opposites. Forgive me for being picky about semantics, but teach isn’t necessarily the opposite of corrupt. To me, teach is a more neutral term that could potentially lead to corruption or enlightenment. It’s like the word technology; intrinsically technology is neither good nor bad, but a positive or negative outcome depends on how one uses it. Here, though, it seems as if teach is positioned as the positive contrast to corrupt, as if they were mutually exclusive. That teaching means influencing another person for good and corrupting means influencing them for ill. 

Sol and Qimir reverse roles throughout this episode, both doing their fair share of what they think of teaching but is actually corrupting or what the student may perceive as corruption but is actually teaching. Osha very defiantly says to Qimir that she won’t be corrupted like her sister, but then by the end of the episode her perspective has been opened up to the point at which she is willing to put on Qimir’s cortosis helmet. And, based on Qimir’s comments about how she is actually the one who is powerful and that she shouldn’t let others place limitations on her abilities, she seems to have learned more about herself. And in contrast to the ruthless and brutal acts of Episode 5, Qimir is so much more nurturing and supportive here. He basically sets up a spa retreat for Osha — there’s a pool, someone to cook for you, someone to help you heal from your wounds — if I didn’t know any better I’d say sign me up! 

Meanwhile, Sol, who been presented up until this point as the kind, nurturing, empathetic Jedi who, specifically because of those qualities, has become known as a Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society level teacher (think back to Vernestra’s comments in Episode 1 about how he’s so good with the younglings (I didn’t have time to go back and get the exact wording, so if someone has it please put it in the comments!). But then in this episode he becomes downright scary, exhibiting more classical villain behavior (which I did not enjoy because I love him so much as a character, but ultimately appreciate that the series is willing to portray him as so flawed). He ties Mae up after outing her as an Osha imposter. And he says that he’s going to Force her to listen to what he has to say. It sounds like he’s going to try to make her believe what his side of the Brendok story is. Perhaps he is being corrupted by his past in this moment. Or perhaps he is, in thinking he can make Mae understand, is trying to corrupt her. 

When I stop to think about what good teaching is, at least to me, I can start to see how this teach/corrupt binary operates, despite them not being true opposites. The difference between to teach and to corrupt is that the latter presumes a kind of facsimile. That the negative influence stems from the corrupt-ee being too much like the corruptor. That you are passing down the worst parts of you or the most toxic beliefs onto someone else, and that in the process they accept and adopt your value system. When I enter a classroom, my goal is not to create intellectual clones of myself. If by the end of a semester all my students are spouting the exact same takes as me, like parrots trained with crackers, then I have failed them. Rather, my goal is to guide them in a way that gives them the tools they need to make their own choices. This might be my bias as a writing teacher or a teacher of the humanities more generally, but I’m trying to help them express their own ideas, not give them the right ideas. Above all else, I want them to have their own ideas and arrive at those ideas on their own. 

The reality is, though, that passing on values to your students is inescapable. When we have class discussions, I try my best to couch my opinions as subjective and to ask questions rather than make comments so that students can form their own thoughts and develop their critical thinking skills. Inevitably, though, just by virtue of designing the course in the way that I have, and by designing the assignments the way that I have, there are underlying values that I cannot avoid, even if it’s something as innocuous or seemingly a given as “claims need support with reasoning or research in order to be persuasive.” That may seem like common sense to many, but it is still, at the end of the day, a subjective value that I have and that I, by teaching a course, pass onto my students. 

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When I was just starting out as a grad student teacher, a core text that influenced my pedagogy was David Bartholomae’s essay, “Inventing the University.” The basic premise of it is that we kind of unreasonably expect students to impersonate — or, as his many examples of student writing illustrate, do bad impressions of us — their teachers or, in other words, scholars. They suddenly have to figure out how to walk and talk like us as they go, before anyone has taught them how. More specifically, Bartholomae says, “The student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were a member of the academy or an historian or an anthropologist or an economist; he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of a discipline, on the other. He must learn to speak our language.” This last part I think is especially important to understand what’s happening in this week’s episode of The Acolyte. Mae and Osha both have different idiosyncratic personal histories, and yet they constantly have to weigh that against disciplinary conventions, whether that’s the Jedi Order’s approach to The Force, The Coven’s Thread, or Qimir’s personal Dark Side-leaning philosophy (I still hesitate to even use the term Sith with him). Where does that leave them? How would that possibly give them space to actually learn anything on their own?

But, it seems as if seeing how the other half lives may do just that. Many fans joked last week that at the end of the episode, Mae has orchestrated a Parent Trap style swap in which the two sisters switch places. Doing this is extremely significant for their growth and development. In The Parent Trap — and forgive me, but I’m thinking of the 1961 film with Haley Mills and not the Lindsay Lohan remake, simply because I’ve seen that older film dozens more times —  part of the point of swapping places is to gain exposure to the way the other twin lives. One twin has never known their mother and wants to go to Boston, impersonating their sister. And the other has never known their father and wants to go to California under the same pretense. And we get to see that they both have lived very differently. The Boston twin has been brought up in a much more aristocratic fashion while the California twin has been raised more “free range,” with a less structured and more rugged. It’s a live demo of nurture over nature.

These two twins biologically are identical, but by living with a different divorced parent they have become different people with different values, attitudes, and worldviews. Similarly, we can clearly see how Osha is the product of the Jedi Order and has known nothing else, and it’s equally clear how Mae is the product of her allegiance to The Coven, but more realistically, Qimir’s revenge-focused tutelage that has fanned the flames of her tragic past. (If only we knew what that was!!! I am so impatient to find out.) While I haven’t ruled out that Sol’s sudden and very intense hug wasn’t him trying to suss out if she was an imposter, but if we take it at face value, Mae at least gets to see what love and care Osha has received by being Sol’s Padawan. That seems to register with her more when Sol says that Osha really loves and cares for Pip, even if he is a droid. Will Mae come out of this with more of an understanding of why Osha has such a strong attachment to Sol? If he keeps treating her like a hostage, maybe not.

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Regardless, one of the best ways to actually teach and not corrupt is to expose students to a variety of points of view and, crucially, helping them develop a self-awareness of their own values. So that they can point to something as a value or an ideological blind spot that they have developed as a result of their environment, family, and all the life experience they have had up until this point. And in being able to point to their own values as values, they can then begin to become more tolerant or at the very least more understanding of the values of others. Doing that is not easy, but always worthwhile.

To return to Yoda’s wisdom from The Empire Strikes Back, the best teachers help their students unlearn what they have been brought up to take for granted. He says to Luke, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” A rigidity in our reality is often the most stubborn obstruction to our learning. As Qui-Gon Jinn says to young Anakin, “Our focus determines our reality.” So perhaps some good might finally come out of Mae and Osha having a different focus.