Last night I gave a talk at the technology fair at my sister's K-8 school in Akron, Ohio. It is pretty easy to understand why high-tech executives are hot on education. They need more and more skilled workers, and competency in math and science is necessary for those skills. Advancement needs new technologies and new technologies are developed by people who understand science, math, and how to learn. Continuing education is necessary to keep our work force up to date.
Education is a strong undercurrent in the movie.
Natural ability is not emphasized as much as training. There is much discussion of learning, teachers, teaching materials, and continuing education. There is even a school of higher education, fittingly up on a mountain. I saw it as a very pro-education movie, something you would expect to be popular after an election where each candidate tried to appear to care more about education than the other. In the movie many martial arts techniques used by the characters appear as magic to us viewers, though those techniques are treated as normal by people skilled in those arts in the movie.