I wonder how much potential this technique could have. I mean, inventing a metaphor that applies to two situation, letting two groups of people debate the metaphor, telling each of them only one of the meanings... and then collect their answers and try applying them to the other situation. Maybe we could find some creative solutions here.

I'll try... okay, sometimes the analogy will be stretched a lot, but that's because the goal is not to be perfect in translating, but to generate ideas.

(polymathwannabe): Recruit the subset of rare humans who enjoy green tickling and employ them as tickling punchbags for green Martians to practice on.

Find people willing to donate a lot of money to education of the least educated people.

Make green Martians wear soft clothes that do not dampen their tentacles' sensitivity too much.

Make education less expensive.

Use some medium (animals, dolls, androids) where green Martians can practice their tickling skills without harming anyone.

Use Khan Academy for teaching.

Find a way to chemically induce metamorphosis in green Martians.

Uhm? Invent a sci-fi technology that will inject knowledge and skills into humans.

Use plastic surgery, medications, or artificial selection to make green Martians' tentacles less stingy.

Give schoolkids Ritalin.

For parents and/or cell donors who are willing, find a way to engineer blue-born Martians.

Sperm donors should provide information about their educational achievement.

Perform non-interventional, follow-up studies on elderly green Martians to assess the worth of a non-tickling life.

Let stupid people live without education, and make a scientific study about their lives. Maybe they are not that much worse than the rest of the population.

(Manfred): A thin layer behind the ears that prevents pain/euphoria from tickling.

Lower the tax, give less education to both stupid and smart people.

Community college classes on tickling.

Classes on "efficient learning" before learning specific subjects.

Economic transactions.

Contracts between private people, like: "I will pay for your education, and in return you will give me 10% of your income during the next 20 years."

Drugs that satisfy Martians and reduce the desire for tickling.

Give stupid people free TV.

Drugs for humans that make them not experience pain from tickling.

Create better propaganda for taxpayers.

(Adele_L): It might be good to have designated spaces where Green Martians can practice tickling participating humans. As more and more of these spaces become available, it becomes more and more socially unacceptable for Green Martians to tickle humans elsewhere. Obviously, for this to work, there would need to be a sufficiently high number of humans willing to participate.

Create more privately sponsored educational institutions. Demanding public education should become socially unacceptable. Obviously, this needs a lot of private sponsors.

For me, a large part of minor annoyances is anticipating minor annoyances. Imagining myself as a human, I might get really sick of stung randomly throughout the day. It would be easier to deal with the occasional sting if they were constrained to certain times of the day or to certain environments. For example, I think it would be good to make a taboo against tickling at work. The blue martians can always tickle later, and the humans would be able to work without having to worry about getting stung.

Have some limit on taxes, so that people don't have to worry that more education will mean more taxes.

Now imagining myself as a Green Martian, I feel like I would naturally feel bad about stinging humans, and try to avoid it for the most part. This anxiety would be significantly worse if the humans visibly disliked me for stinging them. But I would be desperate for someone who could help me become a Blue Martian. Learning the Blue Martian's techniques would be very tempting... Something that might be a good alternative would be if there were humans working with the Blue Martians, finding ways to make the techniques more robust.

Make a reasearch about habits of highly successful students, and use it to improve education.

The biggest problem with the education analogy is that humans are plural, but society is singular. If you want the Martian analogy to work for education, you'd have to have all Martians trying to tickle the same human, of which there is only one.

If there's only one human and an unlimited number of martians can tickle him, things work very differently than if there are many humans:

• The human solves the problem by preemptively consenting to green tickling in exchange for benefits to himself later on from the increase in blue tickling. If there are many humans, the humans face a collective action problem; agreeing to be green-tickled increases the total rate of blue tickling by a negligible amount unless all humans agree on it at once (or unless Martians and humans behave in ways that don't match the analogy).
• If there is only one human, the humans don't compete against each other for the limited supply of blue Martians.
• If an unlimited number of Martians can tickle the same human, the Martians don't have to compete against each other for the limited supply of humans, either.

You can try to fix the analogy up by saying that "human" stands for an individual member of society rather than the whole society, but then the analogy fails because while there are lots of humans, a Martian doesn't pick an individual human but extends its tentacles over all the humans at once.

Furthermore, some of your uses of the analogy fail for other reasons. For instance, "Some think you should be able to pay for private tickling. Others say this is elitist. " But in the analogy, this should be "pay to have the right to tickle someone else", not "pay to be tickled", and even that's a bad comparison because tickling is defined as the cost of education, so "paying to tickle" means "pay in order to be able to pay the cost of education", which is tautological.