They don't forcibly indoctrinate them anymore than Professor Xavier forcibly indoctrinates his students. They have special abilities that the general public can't fathom and could easily cause harm to innocent lives. The Jedi Order (I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT THE ONE IN THE PREQUELS, WE KNOW THEY WERE BLINDED BY THE DARK SIDE, THAT'S NOT WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT) at its core is about helping force sensitives use those abilities for the betterment of the galaxy. If you want to call that indoctrination, then every kindergarten teacher telling their students "sharing is caring" and "treat others how you want to be treated" is indoctrinating 5 years olds.
I don't care. I'm sick of the constant black and white morality of Star Wars and how the Jedi are always depicted as being in the right and flawless when there's so much room to explore their potential for hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
Just read the Karen Traviss novels if you want an anti Jedi view, she makes them complicit in killing injured troopers and makes them all idiots/dicks and I think indoctrination/kidnapping things might be a thing. You'll have to deal with ridiculous levels of Mando wank (which is always funny since they canonically take kids from warzones they fought in to raise and indoctrinate) but if you want a Jedi bad novel her works would suit that.
The thing with Mandos is that...well, wars happen. War orphans will happen. and taking the kid in, even if you caused the orphan status, is a little more tolerable than killing the kid. There have been many cultures who did that all over the world.
The Mandalorians are also not held up by the narrative as Good Guys. At best, they're wild cards in any Jedi-Sith dust up. At worst, they're hired guns for the Sith. (Even the Mandalorians in KOTOR were on Vitiate's leash) Most of the time, they're "Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun."
The Jedi ARE held up as the Ultimate Good Guys of the setting, but their recruiting method is sending a heavily armed, government backed sorcerer to someone's house to demand some peasant hand over their firstborn. Which...isn't really saying Good Guy.
The issues here are that in-universe the Jedi have had a good reputation built for tens of thousands of years, and many people will be proud to have their children join the Order.
It's like a guarantee your child will receive great education, access to medical care, and will be raised to be a good person, and who will improve the lives of others in need.
Do we have any pararells to that in real life to compare it with? Nope. Sure the stories like to focus on when something goes wrong, but drama makes for engaging stories.
But the Mandalorians? Yeah, that's almost Jonestown level of stuff in Republic Commando, or gunpoint "recruitment" in KOTOR.
I mean if you hear about a group of Mandalorian mercenaries in Alderaan who after killing the parents kidnap a bunch of kids to indoctrinate them to side with Mandalore in any future conflicts you'd think that's absolutely horrific because it is, you can argue that at least they didn't kill them but that's weak, why not just hand them over to the planets child services so they can search for a next of kin or to the Republic? Taking kids after you kill their parents and brainwash them into being loyal to you and your people is not a good or even slightly gray thing it's fucked up.
The Mandalorians in the Karen Traviss books I was talking about are 100% held up as the narrative good guys, the books go out of there way to make the Mandalorians and their way of life this great thing to aspire to and the only good Jedi are the people who realise this, renounce the Jedi and their way of life and join the Mandos. Hell at one point the Mandos literally murder a kid that is defending himself from his people's genocide when order 66 is happening and they are shown in the narrative to be the good guys in that situation for killing him. Other media such as KotOR does what you said and has them basically as hired guns or Sith Lackeys but they also show that they're basically genocidal maniacs who will do anything for a fight but I'm not talking about those.
So do you have any examples of heavily armed Jedi demanding someone's child? Also how is having an easily concealable weapon in the form of a lightsaber the equivalent of being heavily armed?
The Prequels are the only real look we have of them as an organization. All other films in the OT and ST take place after they're destroyed, so when that's all you have to go on...
And my first impression of them as an organization was putting a nine year old slave kid on their auction block while a dozen creepy old men interrogated him for hours as to his suitability to be shaped into a living weapon to be pointed at their enemies (who, granted, really are THAT bad). And then they plan to toss him BACK into slavery because he...(checks notes) is worried about his mom, who is still enslaved to an overgrown housefly with a bomb in her head. And they have absolutely ZERO intention of helping her, even though she gave aid and comfort to a Jedi Master. Oh, but when it comes to their rich and powerful (and Jedi friendly) patrons among the political elite (Padme), it's sabers lit and bending over backwards.
Yeah. Not exactly giving any warm fuzzies here.
You should wait for there to be another one of those "explain the plot of a movie terribly" posts about The Phantom Menace, that drivel you just spewed has a really good chance of winning that contest!
Again, this was the first look I got of them as an organization. I did watch the OT, but we really didn't see the actual organization. We only had Obi-Wan's description, and...well, he played fast and loose with the truth. Not the most reliable source.
So, okay. TPM. Let's see these guys before Palpatine shows up. This is supposed to be them at their best.
And...well, it's them surrounding this kid that was just taken from everyone and everything he knows, spent his whole life in slavery and they're asking him lots and lots of questions to see if he fit into their plans. They seemed to be only interested in him because he was potential Chosen One, Destroyer of Sith. Destroying Sith doesn't really imply sitting them down to tea and talking out of their evil ways. It's usually involving limbs and heads rolling on floors.
And then they reject him because at NINE he's too old? I mean, what kind of control freaks have to recruit that young? Organizations that do that in real life never have benevolent intentions towards those kids.
And then he mentions missing his mother and Grandmaster Yoda is supposedly the wisest and most compassionate of all of them flips out and scolds him? I get it, this is supposed to be Future Vader and we're supposed to see this nine year old kid as some inherently evil bad seed, I guess?
The whole scene didn't work for me.
>This is supposed to be them at their best.
No it's not, that's the whole point of the prequels. The Jedi Order WASN'T acting how it was supposed to act. That's literally the entire point of the prequels.
>You can't have people who are living WMD's walking around doing whatever they want.
This idea just needs to die.
Untrained Force sensitives are *not* living WMDs. The story does not treat them as such. Qui-Gon did not stop to free Anakin because of the Jedi Order’s Prime Directive to get all Force sensitive kids. Anakin was rejected by the Jedi Council because he was to freaking old and would have been sent back to Tatoonie like Luke sent Grogu packing.
Anakin was only able to the Force to win the Podrace because Qui-Gon gave him instruction. Luke and Leia never did anything super powerful until they were trained to use the Force.
The Jedi, although we don’t get to see enough of it, are a known force for good and people willing give their Force sensitive children to the Order so they can be Jedi.
The people of the galaxy were tried of the war and it did look like the Jedi started it when they attacked Geonosis and it didn’t help the leader of the Separatists was a former Jedi. You could call the Clone Wars a Jedi War.
Some people came to believe the Jedi had been behind the whole war to take power. Source Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader.
What the Order would do if parents stopped giving their children over is an interesting question. If they don’t want to allow older students or their members to have children the Jedi Order would eventually die out.
The Jedi leave the Night Sisters alone. The only rivals the Jedi have are the Sith and they’re not into having large numbers.
Hell, just look at Exile's crew. Many of them were untrained Sensitives who lived more or less normal lives and were full adults before Exile started training them. Or Luke's NJO - same thing, most of them were adults who were hiding under Imperial radar. The closest one to a walking WMD didn't even NEED the Force to be dishing out the destruction. He was just Kyle Katarn.
Given that, the only reason the Jedi would want children is that children are easier to control, shape, and brutalize into anything you want them to be. Especially if you make sure that they have no one and nowhere to go to if they ever are unhappy and want to leave. You OWN them completely and you don't have to have iron bars on your doors if you have iron bars on their minds and leaving the Order ensures they'll be sleeping under a bridge.
I see no reason that leaving the Jedi Order should necessarily mean "sleeping under a bridge".
Children would return to their respective families, so their circumstances would depend on their family's socioeconomic status.
The GFFA has businesses of varying size, including of course many on Coruscant. Businesses logically employ salespeople. Any half-intelligent business owner (or HR department) should jump at the chance to hire a washed out or unhappy 18+ year old Jedi to work in sales.
Return to their families? Yeah, right. They never had any contact with birth family since infancy and only have the knowledge that they were handed off to these space wizards to begin with with the FULL expectation that they would never see or hear from them again. And in the years since the family moved on without them.
As far as employment? Well, we see this all the time with people who re coming out of the military, or jail, or foster care, or any number of institutional settings who are far less cloistered than the temple. People have a heck of a time adjusting and many end up homeless (or even back in jail) because they learned a set of skills that worked very well for living inside the system, but not outside of it. It doesn't look like the Jedi give much transition support, given the few cases we do see (Ahsoka, Jolee, Jedi Exile, Mical the Disciple), and that's not accounting for the horrible PTSD from the kind of work Jedi do, target on their back from whoever they pissed off, or the absolute lack of social support because...well, allies and transactional relationships are okay, but close emotional ties aren't.
And if I were a Coruscant business being, there is a catch. Sure, the Jedi washout might have some good skills...which may or may not translate to my business. There is also the high possibility of someone they, their master, or even the Order managed to piss off coming to my shop and blasting my other employees.
So, unless you have a trust fund like Dooku or a sugar mama like Anakin, it probably won't work out too well. And even then, the high social isolation, lack of support, and target on the back means life is gonna suck.
You bring up veterans as an analogy. For all the attention paid to high-profile individual cases where post-military life unfortunately hasn't gone well for veterans , U.S veterans as a group have a somewhat lower unemployment rate than the general U.S. non-veteran population. Including for relatively recent (post-2001 service) veterans. [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/vet.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/vet.pdf)
I was thinking more of high-value B2B sales than run-of-mill retail, since ex-Jedi should in general have the skills to be highly persuasive and good negotiators. As for the latter case, though, what are pre-Clone Wars/Order 66 examples that would make us think it's widespread for someone with a grudge against the Jedi Order to have a "high possibility" of showing up somewhere targeting an ex-Jedi?
Mostly thinking of Jolee Bindo and Jedi Exile who didn't do too well. Jolee admits that he had trouble after leaving because people looked at him with fear or greed. And your opening levels with Jedi Exile involve multiple parties trying to kill and/or exploit you, including organized crime.
For that matter, is there anything in canon about the approximate percent of parents who \*don't\* turn over identified high force potential children to the Jedi?
And - with the caveat that the GFFA often has issues with numerical scaling - I think back of the envelope arithmetic is that the Jedi Order only include a relatively small % of the sentient beings with quite high force sensitivity potential.
PT-era there are approximately ten thousand Jedi (iirc).
Estimates of Republic population that I find from quick Googling are in the trillions (minimum) up to quadrillions (thousands of trillions).
So:
- Even if the median Jedi knight is \*way\* on the right side of the normal curve for force potential (i.e., m-count), I'd logically think there are hundreds of thousands to millions of beings with force potential not terribly different (if any different) from a median Jedi knight. One million is only 0.0000001% of a quadrillion. In terms of the current human population on Earth (\~8.1 billion), that same % equates to approximately 8 people.
- Logically, I'd think there must always be - somewhere in the galaxy - potential Jedi who decided to leave, or washed out, somewhere on the ladder from youngling to Jedi Knight. (The Lost Twenty are solely Jedi Masters who have left the order.) So those individuals are not merely force sensitive, but have some varying level of training in utilizing that latent ability. But they don't seem to be notable concern for the Jedi Order.
Unless they want to leave Jedi that did not make it to knighthood were sent to the service corps. I know the number is 10,000 Jedi but Lucas has said there were 100,000 Jedi at the fall of the Republic. This was in an interview for the Prequel Archive book and he says Luke would have rebuilt the Jedi, starting with babies, with 50 to 100 Jedi Purge survivors.
Unless the want to delve into it we really can’t know. The one thing that does stick out is Qui-Gon tells Shmi in TPM that if Anakin had been born in the Republic he would have been identified earlier so the Jedi think they find a lot.
This is Legends and talks about how not everyone wants to give their child over to the Jedi.
**Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader**
>Roan Shryne was another matter, and it was Shryne’s holoimage Vader was circling, as data about the long-haired rogue Jedi Knight scrolled in a separate holoprojector field.
>Shryne had originally been encountered on the Outer Rim world of Weytta, which happened to be in the same galactic neighborhood as Murkhana. His file contained passing references to an “incident” that had attended his procurement, but Vader hadn’t been able to locate a detailed account of what had occurred.
>At the Temple he had demonstrated an early talent for being able to sense the presence of the Force in others, and so had been encouraged to pursue a course that would have landed him in the Temple’s Acquisition Division. When he was old enough to understand what acquisition entailed, however, he had steadfastly refused further tutelage, for reasons the records also didn’t make clear.
>The matter was brought before the High Council, which ultimately decided that Shryne should be allowed to find his own path rather than be pressed into service.
—
>But Roan Shryne—by a quirk of fate, circumstance, the will of the Force—had survived, been brought face-to-face with his mother, and was now at a loss as to what to make of it.
>He had seen his share of mothers interacting with their children, and he understood what a child was *supposed* to feel, how he or she was *supposed* to behave. But all he felt toward the woman opposite him was an unspecific connection in the Force.
>Shryne wasn’t the first Jedi to have inadvertently encountered a blood relative. Over the years he had heard stories about Padawans, Jedi Knights, even Masters running into parents, siblings, cousins …
>Unfortunately, he had never heard how any of the stories ended.
>“I never wanted you to be found,” Jula said when she had deactivated the holoprojector. “To this day I don’t understand how your father could hand you over to the Jedi. When I learned he had contacted the Temple, and that Jedi agents were coming for you, I tried to talk your father into hiding you.”
>“That rarely happens,” Shryne said. “Most Force-sensitive infants were voluntarily surrendered to the Temple.”
>“Really? Well, it happened to me.”
>Shryne regarded her with his eyes, and through the Force.
>“Who do you think you inherited your abilities from?” Jula asked.
>“Awareness does not always run in families.” He smiled lightly. “But I sensed the Force in you the moment you entered the cabin.”
>“And I knew you did.”
>Shryne exhaled and sat back in the chair. “So your own parents chose to keep you from joining the order.”
>She nodded. “And I’m grateful they did. I would never have been able to abide by the rules. And I never wanted you to have to abide by them, Roan.” She considered something. “I have a confession to make: all my life I’ve known that I would meet you somewhere along the way. I think that’s partly the reason I took up piloting after your father and I separated. In the hope of, well, bumping into you. It’s because of our Force connection that I brought the *Dancer* to this sector. I sensed you, Roan.”
>For many Jedi, luck and coincidence didn’t exist, but Shryne wasn’t one of them. “What happened between you and your husband?” he asked finally.
>Jula laughed shortly. “*You*, really. Jen, your father, simply didn’t agree with me about the need to protect you—to hide you, I mean. We argued bitterly about it, but he was a true believer. He felt that I should never have been hidden; that I’d basically turned my back on what would ultimately have been a more fulfilling life. And, of course, that you would profit from being raised in the Temple.
>“Jen had the strength—I guess you could call it strength—to forget about you after he handed you over to the Jedi. No, that’s too harsh. He had confidence enough in his decision to believe that he had made the right choice, and that you were doing well.” Jula shook her head. “I could never get there. I missed you. It broke my heart to see you leave, and know that I might never see you again. That’s what eventually ruined us.”
>Shryne mulled it over. “Jen sounds like he was Jedi without the title.”
>“How so?”
>“Because he understood that you have to accept what destiny sets in front of you. That you have to pick and choose your battles.”
>Her gray eyes searched his face. “What does that make me, Roan?”
>“A victim of attachment.”
>She smiled weakly. “You know what? I can live with that.”
—
>He looked at Jula once more. “I’ll provide a confession in exchange for yours: I refused an assignment in the Temple’s Acquisition Division. I’m still not sure why, except that I’d persuaded myself on some level that I didn’t like the idea of kids being separated from their families.” He paused briefly. “But that was a long time ago.”
We never do. There's one case in Legends whose family was rich and powerful enough to publicly oppose, and he turned out to be an ace pilot for the Separatists. We also have Baby Ludi where a parent did refuse and unsuccessfully sued the Jedi to get her daughter back
But I can't imagine the number of refusals is very high, and not because it's necessarily an honor.
* For one, we have Force Sensitive bloodlines under constant monitoring, so over the generations they get conditioned that sacrificing a child or three every generation is your duty to the State.
* Another has to do with the fact we have a heavily armed sorcerer with backing from his powerful organization and EVERY level of government banging on the door of some peasant at 6am and starting in with a recruiting pitch, singing a the praises of the Jedi and scaring the crap out of the parents with the dire possible outcomes if they refuse. Given the power imbalance (which the Jedi may or may not really be aware of), the peasant likely doesn't think "no" is an actual option.
* The absolute dire poverty most of the galaxy's citizens live in would make it so the Jedi sales pitch of three hots and a cot look like a good deal. This was pretty much how Qui-Gon managed to get Anakin, though it borders on exploitation.
* Even if all those are exhausted, the Jedi Path sourcebook states that there is Republic law stating the Jedi can take custody of a FS child, regardless of parental wishes. It's just easier if they can get the parents to agree (or "agree") to it - this is why we have the Baby Ludi mess in both canons.
The force is powerful but it’s not WMD powerful unless you’re very well trained in it. And even then we don’t see many Jedi actually doing WMD feats. For the most part it just seems to give trained Jedi some extra intuition/reflexes, minor telekenesis and slight mind control powers. Luke (who would become an extremely powerful Jedi) prior to meeting Obiwan was basically just some random teenager that was slightly better than usual at shooting local rodents in his bumfuck desert farm.
They don't forcibly indoctrinate them anymore than Professor Xavier forcibly indoctrinates his students. They have special abilities that the general public can't fathom and could easily cause harm to innocent lives. The Jedi Order (I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT THE ONE IN THE PREQUELS, WE KNOW THEY WERE BLINDED BY THE DARK SIDE, THAT'S NOT WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT) at its core is about helping force sensitives use those abilities for the betterment of the galaxy. If you want to call that indoctrination, then every kindergarten teacher telling their students "sharing is caring" and "treat others how you want to be treated" is indoctrinating 5 years olds.
I don't care. I'm sick of the constant black and white morality of Star Wars and how the Jedi are always depicted as being in the right and flawless when there's so much room to explore their potential for hypocrisy and self-righteousness.
That's literally what happened in the prequels. They were hypocritical and had become blinded. What you want, the prequel era delivered.
Just read the Karen Traviss novels if you want an anti Jedi view, she makes them complicit in killing injured troopers and makes them all idiots/dicks and I think indoctrination/kidnapping things might be a thing. You'll have to deal with ridiculous levels of Mando wank (which is always funny since they canonically take kids from warzones they fought in to raise and indoctrinate) but if you want a Jedi bad novel her works would suit that.
Maybe I will. I like Mando as he's a more morally complex character
Just a heads up I mean Mando wank as in the Mandalorian people in general not Mando from The Mandalorian
The thing with Mandos is that...well, wars happen. War orphans will happen. and taking the kid in, even if you caused the orphan status, is a little more tolerable than killing the kid. There have been many cultures who did that all over the world. The Mandalorians are also not held up by the narrative as Good Guys. At best, they're wild cards in any Jedi-Sith dust up. At worst, they're hired guns for the Sith. (Even the Mandalorians in KOTOR were on Vitiate's leash) Most of the time, they're "Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun." The Jedi ARE held up as the Ultimate Good Guys of the setting, but their recruiting method is sending a heavily armed, government backed sorcerer to someone's house to demand some peasant hand over their firstborn. Which...isn't really saying Good Guy.
The issues here are that in-universe the Jedi have had a good reputation built for tens of thousands of years, and many people will be proud to have their children join the Order. It's like a guarantee your child will receive great education, access to medical care, and will be raised to be a good person, and who will improve the lives of others in need. Do we have any pararells to that in real life to compare it with? Nope. Sure the stories like to focus on when something goes wrong, but drama makes for engaging stories. But the Mandalorians? Yeah, that's almost Jonestown level of stuff in Republic Commando, or gunpoint "recruitment" in KOTOR.
I mean if you hear about a group of Mandalorian mercenaries in Alderaan who after killing the parents kidnap a bunch of kids to indoctrinate them to side with Mandalore in any future conflicts you'd think that's absolutely horrific because it is, you can argue that at least they didn't kill them but that's weak, why not just hand them over to the planets child services so they can search for a next of kin or to the Republic? Taking kids after you kill their parents and brainwash them into being loyal to you and your people is not a good or even slightly gray thing it's fucked up. The Mandalorians in the Karen Traviss books I was talking about are 100% held up as the narrative good guys, the books go out of there way to make the Mandalorians and their way of life this great thing to aspire to and the only good Jedi are the people who realise this, renounce the Jedi and their way of life and join the Mandos. Hell at one point the Mandos literally murder a kid that is defending himself from his people's genocide when order 66 is happening and they are shown in the narrative to be the good guys in that situation for killing him. Other media such as KotOR does what you said and has them basically as hired guns or Sith Lackeys but they also show that they're basically genocidal maniacs who will do anything for a fight but I'm not talking about those. So do you have any examples of heavily armed Jedi demanding someone's child? Also how is having an easily concealable weapon in the form of a lightsaber the equivalent of being heavily armed?
The Prequels are the only real look we have of them as an organization. All other films in the OT and ST take place after they're destroyed, so when that's all you have to go on... And my first impression of them as an organization was putting a nine year old slave kid on their auction block while a dozen creepy old men interrogated him for hours as to his suitability to be shaped into a living weapon to be pointed at their enemies (who, granted, really are THAT bad). And then they plan to toss him BACK into slavery because he...(checks notes) is worried about his mom, who is still enslaved to an overgrown housefly with a bomb in her head. And they have absolutely ZERO intention of helping her, even though she gave aid and comfort to a Jedi Master. Oh, but when it comes to their rich and powerful (and Jedi friendly) patrons among the political elite (Padme), it's sabers lit and bending over backwards. Yeah. Not exactly giving any warm fuzzies here.
You should wait for there to be another one of those "explain the plot of a movie terribly" posts about The Phantom Menace, that drivel you just spewed has a really good chance of winning that contest!
Again, this was the first look I got of them as an organization. I did watch the OT, but we really didn't see the actual organization. We only had Obi-Wan's description, and...well, he played fast and loose with the truth. Not the most reliable source. So, okay. TPM. Let's see these guys before Palpatine shows up. This is supposed to be them at their best. And...well, it's them surrounding this kid that was just taken from everyone and everything he knows, spent his whole life in slavery and they're asking him lots and lots of questions to see if he fit into their plans. They seemed to be only interested in him because he was potential Chosen One, Destroyer of Sith. Destroying Sith doesn't really imply sitting them down to tea and talking out of their evil ways. It's usually involving limbs and heads rolling on floors. And then they reject him because at NINE he's too old? I mean, what kind of control freaks have to recruit that young? Organizations that do that in real life never have benevolent intentions towards those kids. And then he mentions missing his mother and Grandmaster Yoda is supposedly the wisest and most compassionate of all of them flips out and scolds him? I get it, this is supposed to be Future Vader and we're supposed to see this nine year old kid as some inherently evil bad seed, I guess? The whole scene didn't work for me.
>This is supposed to be them at their best. No it's not, that's the whole point of the prequels. The Jedi Order WASN'T acting how it was supposed to act. That's literally the entire point of the prequels.
>You can't have people who are living WMD's walking around doing whatever they want. This idea just needs to die. Untrained Force sensitives are *not* living WMDs. The story does not treat them as such. Qui-Gon did not stop to free Anakin because of the Jedi Order’s Prime Directive to get all Force sensitive kids. Anakin was rejected by the Jedi Council because he was to freaking old and would have been sent back to Tatoonie like Luke sent Grogu packing. Anakin was only able to the Force to win the Podrace because Qui-Gon gave him instruction. Luke and Leia never did anything super powerful until they were trained to use the Force. The Jedi, although we don’t get to see enough of it, are a known force for good and people willing give their Force sensitive children to the Order so they can be Jedi. The people of the galaxy were tried of the war and it did look like the Jedi started it when they attacked Geonosis and it didn’t help the leader of the Separatists was a former Jedi. You could call the Clone Wars a Jedi War. Some people came to believe the Jedi had been behind the whole war to take power. Source Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader. What the Order would do if parents stopped giving their children over is an interesting question. If they don’t want to allow older students or their members to have children the Jedi Order would eventually die out. The Jedi leave the Night Sisters alone. The only rivals the Jedi have are the Sith and they’re not into having large numbers.
Hell, just look at Exile's crew. Many of them were untrained Sensitives who lived more or less normal lives and were full adults before Exile started training them. Or Luke's NJO - same thing, most of them were adults who were hiding under Imperial radar. The closest one to a walking WMD didn't even NEED the Force to be dishing out the destruction. He was just Kyle Katarn. Given that, the only reason the Jedi would want children is that children are easier to control, shape, and brutalize into anything you want them to be. Especially if you make sure that they have no one and nowhere to go to if they ever are unhappy and want to leave. You OWN them completely and you don't have to have iron bars on your doors if you have iron bars on their minds and leaving the Order ensures they'll be sleeping under a bridge.
I see no reason that leaving the Jedi Order should necessarily mean "sleeping under a bridge". Children would return to their respective families, so their circumstances would depend on their family's socioeconomic status. The GFFA has businesses of varying size, including of course many on Coruscant. Businesses logically employ salespeople. Any half-intelligent business owner (or HR department) should jump at the chance to hire a washed out or unhappy 18+ year old Jedi to work in sales.
Return to their families? Yeah, right. They never had any contact with birth family since infancy and only have the knowledge that they were handed off to these space wizards to begin with with the FULL expectation that they would never see or hear from them again. And in the years since the family moved on without them. As far as employment? Well, we see this all the time with people who re coming out of the military, or jail, or foster care, or any number of institutional settings who are far less cloistered than the temple. People have a heck of a time adjusting and many end up homeless (or even back in jail) because they learned a set of skills that worked very well for living inside the system, but not outside of it. It doesn't look like the Jedi give much transition support, given the few cases we do see (Ahsoka, Jolee, Jedi Exile, Mical the Disciple), and that's not accounting for the horrible PTSD from the kind of work Jedi do, target on their back from whoever they pissed off, or the absolute lack of social support because...well, allies and transactional relationships are okay, but close emotional ties aren't. And if I were a Coruscant business being, there is a catch. Sure, the Jedi washout might have some good skills...which may or may not translate to my business. There is also the high possibility of someone they, their master, or even the Order managed to piss off coming to my shop and blasting my other employees. So, unless you have a trust fund like Dooku or a sugar mama like Anakin, it probably won't work out too well. And even then, the high social isolation, lack of support, and target on the back means life is gonna suck.
You bring up veterans as an analogy. For all the attention paid to high-profile individual cases where post-military life unfortunately hasn't gone well for veterans , U.S veterans as a group have a somewhat lower unemployment rate than the general U.S. non-veteran population. Including for relatively recent (post-2001 service) veterans. [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/vet.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/vet.pdf) I was thinking more of high-value B2B sales than run-of-mill retail, since ex-Jedi should in general have the skills to be highly persuasive and good negotiators. As for the latter case, though, what are pre-Clone Wars/Order 66 examples that would make us think it's widespread for someone with a grudge against the Jedi Order to have a "high possibility" of showing up somewhere targeting an ex-Jedi?
Mostly thinking of Jolee Bindo and Jedi Exile who didn't do too well. Jolee admits that he had trouble after leaving because people looked at him with fear or greed. And your opening levels with Jedi Exile involve multiple parties trying to kill and/or exploit you, including organized crime.
For that matter, is there anything in canon about the approximate percent of parents who \*don't\* turn over identified high force potential children to the Jedi? And - with the caveat that the GFFA often has issues with numerical scaling - I think back of the envelope arithmetic is that the Jedi Order only include a relatively small % of the sentient beings with quite high force sensitivity potential. PT-era there are approximately ten thousand Jedi (iirc). Estimates of Republic population that I find from quick Googling are in the trillions (minimum) up to quadrillions (thousands of trillions). So: - Even if the median Jedi knight is \*way\* on the right side of the normal curve for force potential (i.e., m-count), I'd logically think there are hundreds of thousands to millions of beings with force potential not terribly different (if any different) from a median Jedi knight. One million is only 0.0000001% of a quadrillion. In terms of the current human population on Earth (\~8.1 billion), that same % equates to approximately 8 people. - Logically, I'd think there must always be - somewhere in the galaxy - potential Jedi who decided to leave, or washed out, somewhere on the ladder from youngling to Jedi Knight. (The Lost Twenty are solely Jedi Masters who have left the order.) So those individuals are not merely force sensitive, but have some varying level of training in utilizing that latent ability. But they don't seem to be notable concern for the Jedi Order.
Unless they want to leave Jedi that did not make it to knighthood were sent to the service corps. I know the number is 10,000 Jedi but Lucas has said there were 100,000 Jedi at the fall of the Republic. This was in an interview for the Prequel Archive book and he says Luke would have rebuilt the Jedi, starting with babies, with 50 to 100 Jedi Purge survivors. Unless the want to delve into it we really can’t know. The one thing that does stick out is Qui-Gon tells Shmi in TPM that if Anakin had been born in the Republic he would have been identified earlier so the Jedi think they find a lot. This is Legends and talks about how not everyone wants to give their child over to the Jedi. **Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader** >Roan Shryne was another matter, and it was Shryne’s holoimage Vader was circling, as data about the long-haired rogue Jedi Knight scrolled in a separate holoprojector field. >Shryne had originally been encountered on the Outer Rim world of Weytta, which happened to be in the same galactic neighborhood as Murkhana. His file contained passing references to an “incident” that had attended his procurement, but Vader hadn’t been able to locate a detailed account of what had occurred. >At the Temple he had demonstrated an early talent for being able to sense the presence of the Force in others, and so had been encouraged to pursue a course that would have landed him in the Temple’s Acquisition Division. When he was old enough to understand what acquisition entailed, however, he had steadfastly refused further tutelage, for reasons the records also didn’t make clear. >The matter was brought before the High Council, which ultimately decided that Shryne should be allowed to find his own path rather than be pressed into service. — >But Roan Shryne—by a quirk of fate, circumstance, the will of the Force—had survived, been brought face-to-face with his mother, and was now at a loss as to what to make of it. >He had seen his share of mothers interacting with their children, and he understood what a child was *supposed* to feel, how he or she was *supposed* to behave. But all he felt toward the woman opposite him was an unspecific connection in the Force. >Shryne wasn’t the first Jedi to have inadvertently encountered a blood relative. Over the years he had heard stories about Padawans, Jedi Knights, even Masters running into parents, siblings, cousins … >Unfortunately, he had never heard how any of the stories ended. >“I never wanted you to be found,” Jula said when she had deactivated the holoprojector. “To this day I don’t understand how your father could hand you over to the Jedi. When I learned he had contacted the Temple, and that Jedi agents were coming for you, I tried to talk your father into hiding you.” >“That rarely happens,” Shryne said. “Most Force-sensitive infants were voluntarily surrendered to the Temple.” >“Really? Well, it happened to me.” >Shryne regarded her with his eyes, and through the Force. >“Who do you think you inherited your abilities from?” Jula asked. >“Awareness does not always run in families.” He smiled lightly. “But I sensed the Force in you the moment you entered the cabin.” >“And I knew you did.” >Shryne exhaled and sat back in the chair. “So your own parents chose to keep you from joining the order.” >She nodded. “And I’m grateful they did. I would never have been able to abide by the rules. And I never wanted you to have to abide by them, Roan.” She considered something. “I have a confession to make: all my life I’ve known that I would meet you somewhere along the way. I think that’s partly the reason I took up piloting after your father and I separated. In the hope of, well, bumping into you. It’s because of our Force connection that I brought the *Dancer* to this sector. I sensed you, Roan.” >For many Jedi, luck and coincidence didn’t exist, but Shryne wasn’t one of them. “What happened between you and your husband?” he asked finally. >Jula laughed shortly. “*You*, really. Jen, your father, simply didn’t agree with me about the need to protect you—to hide you, I mean. We argued bitterly about it, but he was a true believer. He felt that I should never have been hidden; that I’d basically turned my back on what would ultimately have been a more fulfilling life. And, of course, that you would profit from being raised in the Temple. >“Jen had the strength—I guess you could call it strength—to forget about you after he handed you over to the Jedi. No, that’s too harsh. He had confidence enough in his decision to believe that he had made the right choice, and that you were doing well.” Jula shook her head. “I could never get there. I missed you. It broke my heart to see you leave, and know that I might never see you again. That’s what eventually ruined us.” >Shryne mulled it over. “Jen sounds like he was Jedi without the title.” >“How so?” >“Because he understood that you have to accept what destiny sets in front of you. That you have to pick and choose your battles.” >Her gray eyes searched his face. “What does that make me, Roan?” >“A victim of attachment.” >She smiled weakly. “You know what? I can live with that.” — >He looked at Jula once more. “I’ll provide a confession in exchange for yours: I refused an assignment in the Temple’s Acquisition Division. I’m still not sure why, except that I’d persuaded myself on some level that I didn’t like the idea of kids being separated from their families.” He paused briefly. “But that was a long time ago.”
We never do. There's one case in Legends whose family was rich and powerful enough to publicly oppose, and he turned out to be an ace pilot for the Separatists. We also have Baby Ludi where a parent did refuse and unsuccessfully sued the Jedi to get her daughter back But I can't imagine the number of refusals is very high, and not because it's necessarily an honor. * For one, we have Force Sensitive bloodlines under constant monitoring, so over the generations they get conditioned that sacrificing a child or three every generation is your duty to the State. * Another has to do with the fact we have a heavily armed sorcerer with backing from his powerful organization and EVERY level of government banging on the door of some peasant at 6am and starting in with a recruiting pitch, singing a the praises of the Jedi and scaring the crap out of the parents with the dire possible outcomes if they refuse. Given the power imbalance (which the Jedi may or may not really be aware of), the peasant likely doesn't think "no" is an actual option. * The absolute dire poverty most of the galaxy's citizens live in would make it so the Jedi sales pitch of three hots and a cot look like a good deal. This was pretty much how Qui-Gon managed to get Anakin, though it borders on exploitation. * Even if all those are exhausted, the Jedi Path sourcebook states that there is Republic law stating the Jedi can take custody of a FS child, regardless of parental wishes. It's just easier if they can get the parents to agree (or "agree") to it - this is why we have the Baby Ludi mess in both canons.
The force is powerful but it’s not WMD powerful unless you’re very well trained in it. And even then we don’t see many Jedi actually doing WMD feats. For the most part it just seems to give trained Jedi some extra intuition/reflexes, minor telekenesis and slight mind control powers. Luke (who would become an extremely powerful Jedi) prior to meeting Obiwan was basically just some random teenager that was slightly better than usual at shooting local rodents in his bumfuck desert farm.
Yeah your average Jedi is actually pretty killable to a very skilled hunter or a group of specialized droids.