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.