Ysabella Dawson Head of Year 8
THE TIPPING POINT: Youth Anxiety in the Age of Climate Change Education is central to climate change mitigation, adaptation and resilience. As such, it is necessary to ask: what is being done to recognise the concerns of young people and support climate change education in Australian schools?
Morrison went on to stress the importance of giving young people the ‘confidence that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in’, but also ‘an economy to live in as well’. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘we should let our children be children, let our kids be kids, let our teenagers be teenagers.’ While Morrison’s sentiment seems intuitive – kids should, of course, be afforded the right to enjoy their childhood – such rhetoric is worrisome in that it casts doubt on the capacity of intelligent young people: they are credulous and easily led into anxiety by those who would then exploit such concerns. This perspective defines the role of adults to be one of placation and of assuaging their fears. On this view, school students
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Listening to her speak, there is something almost biblical about Thunberg’s language: its commanding clarity, its plain expression, its illustrative force. Unsurprisingly, her speech was highly divisive, and it was not long before our own prime
The passion and aspiration of the young must be respected and harnessed, he said. At the same time, ‘we must guard against others who would seek to compound or, worse, facelessly exploit their anxiety for their own agendas’ (Morrison 2019).
SUNATA
On Friday 20 September 2019, school students around the globe took part in what was the largest mobilisation yet attempted by the youth climate movement, launched last year by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. The following day, the young activist (Thunberg 2019) gave a rousing address at the United Nations in New York where she implored the political class to recognise the urgency of the ecological situation being felt by younger generations. Thunberg went on to condemn their flippant scepticism, lamenting the perceived triteness and shallow optimism of world leaders. Their cursory analysis, she believes, fails to comprehend the gravity of the climate emergency.
minister, Scott Morrison, entered the discourse in response to Thunberg’s accusations of political apathy.
