I was reading an interview with George Lucas in Rolling Stone and he said the reason the Jedi Councel felt Anakin was too old to train in as a Jedi was that he still had emotional ties to his mother and past on Tatooine. Maybe Luke was ready to train, inspite of his advanced years, as he no longer had any emotional attatchments on Tatooine. He in fact declared there was nothing left for him on Tatooine, where as Anakin swore he would return to free the slaves. Anakin left with an attachment, where as Luke basically became as a child, and was prime for training.

Maybe how old a Jedi is to train is all subjective. Ideally, they should be young, as most adults will have emotional attatchments, but there could be rare exemptions, and Luke happened to be one of those exemptions.

Well, when you don't have any jedi left, you'll probably train anyone who wants the training.

But Luke ends up developing all kinds of emotional attachments to people during the rest of the OT anyway.

no shit. beggers can't be choosers. Luke's emotional baggage carries on even worse than anakins in the long run. Between almost fucking it up by going after han and leia to giving himself up to Vader to try to save him. Talk about E/N all over the place. It was just a matter of not having anyone else to choose from really.

Well, there wasn't even a council in the OT. It was just Yoda and Obi Wan, right? They both already had attachments to Luke.

i guess technically, there was also qui gon

Luke was too old but they had little choice. Luke - being Vader's son - stood the best chance to take down his father...Luke was probably filled with yummy mitochlorins just like his paw. But he was too old. And thus made the same mistakes dear old dad did. Leaving his training early to save Han.

i see it as Yoda and the entire Jedi order had to "unlearn what they had learned" as yoda puts it. they realized that the way the Jedi order was going before the Emperor was flawed and that directly lead to the downfall of the Jedi.

They had to start from scratch and let the will of the living force control everything. hence why they didn't start training Luke and Leia from the start. They realized they where flawed all along