4 minute read
Opinion - Climate Change
ADULT(ERATING) THE TRUTH: CHILDREN AND CLIMATE CHANGE
By Alex Caesari
It came as little surprise when media coverage of the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), a landmark summit to decide the future of our planet, focused on Greta Thunberg delivering a “foul-mouthed rant” in the rainy streets of Glasgow rather than her evocative censure of the inaction, empty promises, and industrial lobbying taking place inside the conference.
In response to the media backlash, the 18-year-old Swedish activist announced on Twitter that she would “go net-zero on swear words and bad language.” Ironically, Thunberg’s lone tweet shows more commitment to a net-zero cause than Scott Morrison’s entire government.
Later in the week, Barack Obama offered his support for those young activists clamoring for objective action: “The most important energy in this movement is coming from young people,” he said. “The reason is simple. They have more at stake in this than anybody else.”
The reason they have more at stake should be obvious to the former president. “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer,” he once boasted to a room full of industry leaders. “That was me, people. Say thank you.”
Under Obama’s presidency, exports of crude oil skyrocketed by around 750% and the U.S. ploughed $34bn into at least 70 fossil fuel projects around the world. High praise from the former president, then.
Because of her staunch, unrelenting stance against climate change, Thunberg has ostensibly become the face of what Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s chief inspector, has previously described as a kind of “militant activism” which is “disrupting the work of schools.”
Such a statement necessitates the question: What is the work of schools?
To engender political acquiescence among young people? To teach children that standing up against political tyranny and environmental catastrophe is disruptive? To transform individuals with unique insights and values into the indoctrinated Spies of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four?
“Keep calm and carry on, children,” Spielman appears to be saying. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
Unless, of course, what you don’t know is world-altering climate change.
Indeed, some would still have children believe that the world in which they live is fantasy, a fairy-tale universe in which little princesses are rescued by little princes. In this alternative reality, forests stay standing, cities are powered by magic instead of coal, and good triumphs over evil. All live happily ever after.
But death, abandonment, trauma, inju-
ry, imprisonment – these are all present in the stories that parents so eagerly narrate to their children as they slowly fall asleep each night.
So, what about climate change and global warming and rising sea levels?
That’s simply too far.
As the National Education Union has recently observed, in our schools, only 4% of pupils think they know enough about climate change and at least 68% want to learn more about it. At the same time, just 30% of teachers feel that they have received adequate training to teach about climate change with any confidence. So: 96% of children don’t know enough about our climate crisis, and 70% of teachers are stuck in the pedagogical mire of an educational system that betrays the concrete reality of the environmental catastrophe we are sleepwalking into.
“There needs to be more emphasis on climate change,” explains a secondary school teacher from Norwich, U.K. “Without doing my own research, I would struggle to teach about climate change. In many schools, there’s a basic lack of understanding about how we impact the environment. For instance, something as simple as recycling bins are few and far between.”
According to the UK Department for Education’s strategy for climate change, recently updated in November, schools should not “encourage pupils to join specific campaigning groups or engage in specific political activity, such as protests.”
“But children need to be taught that they are a new generation and that they need to make the changes that the previous generations have failed to do,” says another teacher working at a secondary school in London. “If this means a peaceful protest, then so be it.”
We are, therefore, presented with a troubling antinomy: by labelling young people as apart from, rather than a part of, our climate catastrophe, schools and wider society disenfranchise them from the very discourses which seek to fix their status as non-participants.
Such discourses are not benign; they will decide the future of our planet.
“Climate change worries me,” says a pupil from Norwich. “We’re not really being taught about it. It’s all left to the older generations. They’ve already had their chance to try and improve the state of the world and have made little to no effort changing it. We should have our chance now to make a change, but we need to be taught more about it in order to do so.”
The chance to right the wrongs of previous generations is not disruptive nor a blind act of rebellion nor something to be buried by an outdated school curriculum – it is owed.
It is the very least they deserve.
After all, it took the wild outburst of a child in Hans Christian Anderson’s classic folk tale for adults to readily admit that the emperor was not wearing any clothes. c
