The Jedi order is actually a plot to create an army of janissaries out of the poor*. It's Vietnam all over again. *By which I'm positing that most families that give up their children to be Jedi would be like the Skywalkers, not slaves since that's illegal in the Republic but otherwise believing that their child will have a better life as a Jedi than they would have in their current situation.
IIRC, Death Star suggests that midi-chlorian counts are fairly routine blood-test information even under the Empire--I don't remember exactly how it comes up; I could be off. Edit: per the wook...
Death Star actually clarified it was no longer done--oh and if you DID test for it, the Empire found out and killed you.
Well he stumbled upon the information without originally looking for it; that seems to suggest that it still shows up on a blood test, you're just supposed to ignore it.
Assuming midichlorian count was a standard part of a blood assay, and that said assay was automated (which it almost certainly was), it would still show up on any pre-Imperial piece of equipment, which would probably be most of the medical gear in the galaxy. So presumably the Empire found it simpler to order people not to talk about midichlorians rather than replace trillions of pieces of medical gear.
The Jedi Path takes the approach that "the Jedi Order have legal custody of all Force-Sensitives in the Republic". At least one Force Sensitive tradition- the Zeison Sha- have had their grudge against the Jedi reinforced by this. From the Jedi Academy Training Manual: As travel to and from the planet increases, several members of the Zeison Sha venture forth to explore the galaxy and find the Jedi all too eager to wrest their Force-sensitive children from them and train them as Jedi. Outraged, the Zeison Sha return home only to reinforce their anti-Jedi beliefs. From Yoda: Dark Rendezvous, pages 180-181 It was one of the things they never quite mentioned in the Temple- how many people, even in the Republic, viewed the Jedi with distrust or even outright hostility. The sentiment had grown during the Clone Wars, to the point that Jai hated going on the missions to identify new Jedi; as much as he knew the children were going to live better, richer, and more useful lives than they otherwise would have had, the whispers of "baby-napper!" bothered him, as did the heartbroken eyes of the parents who watched their children being led away. Less painful but still ugly was the relief in the eyes of a different kind of parent, the ones glad to be rid of the burden of an extra mouth to feed. One couldn't see that without wondering which kind of baby one had been oneself.
Do you(whomever you may be) really believe that a Jedi Master like Jorus C'baoth would respect the word no from a muggle? We have canonical evidence which shows his feelings on the subject as he tried to take a Force sensitive child on outbound flight without the parents consent. Now I don't know that there was a C'baoth for every Qui-Gon - I'd imagine the break down isn't that high. But there is no doubt in my mind that there were Jedi who took children from their parents for the betterment of the child and the galaxy as a whole, regardless of how mom and dad felt. I just wouldn't imagine it to be the norm.....maybe. Lets look at a few different individual cases. Lorn Pavan agreed to give his son Jax to the Jedi order apparently not realizing that it would end any visitation rights he had with his son. The Jedi then fired him from his job at the temple just to make sure he wouldn't be close to his son training. Crys Taanzer, caught in the middle of The Clone Wars reluctantly "allowed"(the comic pages themselves are unclear about this, but she does say later that she allowed him to be taken) a Jedi to take her son under extreme duress. She was basically given the choice of handing her son over to the Jedi, or likely seeing him die in the middle of a war zone. She didn't really have a choice as keeping her son with her would have seemed to be a death sentence. The Jedi who took the child is actually killed later in that battle, but Crys regrets her decision for the rest of her life. This would be an example of the Jedi using a situation to take a child, instead of allowing for a proper choice to be made. In the end, though Crys didn't know it, her son did survive so in a way she made the right choice as far as his life was concerned, but it was a decision made while she was between a rock and a hard place. Under Republic law the Jedi were entitled to the children if the parents agreed to it or not(re: The Jedi Path), and the first hand accounts from some Jedi in that book show a real disconnect . The Jedi also had their pick of government run orphanages. Combined with that law, I'd say the Jedi got every child they wanted from those establishments. I had a lot more typed. Quotes from the Jedi Path, stuff about Roan Shryne, Darsha Assant & Etain Tur Mukan, quotes from Luke Skywalker - all kinds of good stuff that I lost when TF.N auto logged me out Lets just say there is more than enough information to question the moral fabric of at least some members of the Old Jedi Order.
Worth noting: during the entire 'Golden Age' of the Republic, the Jedi Order was shrinking, perpetually, and by a lot. The 10,000 Knights and Masters that are represented immediately prior to the Clone Wars are an order that is a shell of its former self. A Jedi Order that recruited even every single force user on Coruscant alone would have had 200,000 members at a minimum. This strongly suggests that the Jedi Order is not utilizing its legal claim of custody over Force sensitive children in anything resembling an aggressive fashion; instead it suggests that the Jedi would rather let their order crumble down to nothing than forcibly recruit the unwilling.
Do you(whomever you may be) really believe that a Jedi Master like Jorus C'baoth would respect the word no from a muggle? He's not a member of the "Acquisitions Division" so what he would or wouldn't do is irrelevant. I imagine the Jedi Council were very careful in which Jedi were authorised to select children and which weren't. C'Baoth wouldn't have been given that authority.
Indeed. And C'Baoth is pretty much the only Jedi we see with this view. The other Jedi are considerably more, oh what's the word I'm looking for. Sane!!
It was in some Tales of the Jedi comic, where Mace had to fight a Zeltron bounty hunter who had been paid by parents to get their baby back. Which suggests that some parents were not all that willing to give up their baby, but the jedi prevail against their will. In this instance, Mace relented at the end.
Yup- Children of the Force, in Star Wars Tales Volume 4. Some elements of it may not be canon- since Mace was an orphan when taken by the Jedi, according to Shatterpoint. Maybe Mace was taken from adopted parents rather than birth parents? http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mace_Windu
SW Doctor: Ok, the good news is your child is force-sensitive. The bad news: He's gluten intolerant. Ooo-bah. Ooooo-bah.
The bounty hunter was Vianna D'Pow, Some time prior to the Clone Wars, Vianna took a job to kidnap a Force-sensitive baby from the Jedi Order. Just after infiltrating the Jedi Temple nursery and placing a Sullustan baby in a sling, she quite literally ran into Jedi Master Mace Windu as he was reading a datapad. The two engaged in a fight, with Vianna threatening to kill the infant and Windu calling her bluff. After he told her that stealing a Jedi youngling to sell on the black market was low, even for her, D'Pow revealed the true reason for her mission. The infant's parents had asked her to take their child back from the Jedi, as they never wanted to give up their baby in the first place. Windu was shocked by this development, and protested that it was an honor for an infant to become a Jedi. D'Pow began to tell him he could never understand, but then saw what was on the datapad Windu had been reading - a letter from his parents, asking him to make contact with them. After realizing that Windu could indeed understand the ramifications of a family being split apart, she willingly left the infant with him and escaped. Windu later returned the infant to its parents himself.
10,000 Knights (with the implication that this includes Masters) prior to the Clone Wars, comes from the TPM novelization. I'm not sure where the idea that there were 200,000 Force Sensitives with Knight-level potential on Coruscant comes from though.
I was wondering about the 200,000 potential members from Coruscant's population alone. Sorry, I should have been more clear.
I believe he's extrapolating from the known rate of Force users on Kesh, but the exact math I'm not sure of. For the record, 200 thousand sensitives on Coruscant is a rate of 0.00002%
WEG, notably, said there were millions of force-sensitives in the galaxy total. Only thousands of force-users.
