In support of the school strikers today

I’m post-interview today, so very tired, but I did want to take a moment to talk about the treatment of students and children by UK politics. Not just because of today’s student strikers supporting climate change, but also because of attitudes I’ve seen displayed towards those in education more generally, such as in the recent debate over school start times for which its student proponent travelled up to parliament to observe.

The treatment of children and young people by society at large reminds me very much of the dissonance I once saw pointed out about how Britain and other such countries like to be thought about by potential migrants. It was argued that we like to think of the UK as the place where everyone wants to live, because it lets us feel good about ourselves and our decisions to help by giving to charity. There’s a good reason the Windrush scandal’s appeal to this more positively nationalistic perspective worked so well. Yet at the same time, there are whipped-up concerns about immigration’s effects on culture and the job market. When managed, in our control and, ideally, once or twice removed, we’re happy to see the UK as a place people want to live. But when that message works too well, the situation is portrayed in totally different terms: as a form of monstrous encroachment.  It’s classic doublethink, as was referenced recently in parliament; holding two contradictory ideas in one’s head at once, and accepting both as true.

In the case of immigration, as with other issues, this is possible because the two perspectives are responses to two separate ideas which we don’t usually consider simultaneously. One is tied to an idealised, accepting UK; the other to a UK under threat of being overwhelmed. Both are fundamentally connected to how much control we feel we have. The same is true of children and young people. We hold them up as paragons of innocence and virtue when they are within our control, but deride them for insolence when they dare to hold an unplanned or inconvenient opinion. When children (usually under-10s) do generally what we want and follow paths which reinforce our own beliefs about life, we are perfectly willing to support their causes. When they and their parents point out to us the ineffectiveness of current start times for their education, we criticise them for not learning how to endure workplace demands. This has even been true of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who draws regular criticism for putting forward young people’s perspectives and updating political norms. I sometimes get the impression that people in power would rather that students gave them a presentation about the aesthetics of balloons than about the imminent dangers of climate change.

Young people today must pass challenges we’ve set to be deemed them worthy of our consideration, no matter whether we need yet another exam for UK students. They must follow daily routines akin to workplace requirements and suffer because we suffer, regardless of studies on how sleep cycles change, whether these hours are actually effective, differences in requirements for learning rather than mindless email checking or whether we wish those changes had been made for us, too. Not to mention the newly discovered benefits of flexi-time, volunteer days and homeworking for workplace productivity, team bonding and general happiness. Surely we should be designing a school system for the modern day, rather than fifty years ago?

School standards have changed from when many politicians were in power. John Major had no degree – he took night classes to gain the knowledge to become an MP. Jeremy Corbyn dropped out having achieved two E grade A levels. When most senior politicians were in education, climate change wasn’t on the agenda. Now, students regularly receive education on the issue. They take their studies more seriously, as education policy and changing life circumstances have compelled them to do. They aren’t asking to take this decision for today’s phlegmatic politicians, tied up in the weeds of government, but they are asking to act in an advisory capacity, on one day, to show that they feel this strongly about the need for change.

Too often, our perspectives on children today are based on our own feelings about our current selves, our past selves and things from which we derive comfort or fear, rather than any actual attention paid to assessing the situation of the children themselves from their own perspectives. Fears of technology translate into bans on smartphones or frantic electronic curfews because adults too often feel ill-equipped to judge for their children what they see online – or, it seems, to talk to their children and understand their world. Comfort in our pride of the challenges we overcame to get to where we are leads us to see those same challenges as necessary to legitimise other people. It’s one reason why those experiencing societal hardship such as low-income backgrounds, racism or stringent immigration checks sometimes endorse those tests for others.

This equivalence of other situations with our own is reflected in perceptions of students in education. Despite making UK students pass ever more stringent checks and barriers to be worthy of entering the working world, at no point do we ever acknowledge that these tests and lessons may actually be effective in changing societal behaviour. We get so bogged down in rhetoric that these issues exist that we fail to recognise the effects of policy changes ten or twenty years down the line, when those individuals emerge into society. Stories of universities as hotbeds for alcoholism are contrasted with confusion over drops in alcohol consumption, rises in health-food crazes, broadening of culinary horizons and declining rates of teenage pregnancy. Climate change is one of these trends on which lessons have been effective. What we’re seeing now in student protests are the long-term results of education policy. We should be rewarding students, rather than pushing them towards ever more mythical levels of rigour and improvement.

Life experience is certainly important in assessing these situations with more perspective. Different issues become important and the stresses of life set earlier years in context. However, progress through life equates to distance from that younger age which we feel so qualified to criticise. We are all most aware of the issues for our age group, whilst our memories of our past decline and become set in the context of our incomplete selves. We learn and educate at all stages of life. It is a self-aware, self-challenging, inclusive and serious combination of life experience and feedback from the front line which will lead to overcoming the challenges of today. This goes as much for today’s schoolchildren as it does for immigration, war zones, zero hours contracts or indeed any other challenge on which we feel so qualified to judge whilst drawing only on our own past experiences and our external judgements of others. The bravery of enduring self-criticism, delegitimisation and acknowledging absence of knowledge is what leads to finding a true compromise and an optimal solution for today’s growing challenges.

Without adults taking them seriously, students have all the education, but none of the agency. They are not enfranchised, so politicians do not take them seriously. Is it any surprise that students have been left with no option but to force politicians to take notice through strike action? It is a deliberate choice: striking, rather than protesting. In parliament, MPs asked why students couldn’t do this on a Saturday, given the disruption caused by a strike. In asking this question, these politicians managed to neatly miss that this is the point of an effective strike: to cause meaningful disruption and force change where no agency otherwise exists. They also revealed how little they take students seriously, treating this Friday as a nuisance rather than an intentional, knowing disruption with a clear aim.

So instead of criticising children for striking today, consider instead whether it’s worth spending one Friday’s schooling on your future. Years, even decades, of quality of life, for the cost of one day spent dreaming of the weekend. We’re always asking students to take responsibility, so we should recognise it when they do, rather than only when it benignly pats us on the back. After all, they aren’t alone: students from the Parkland school shooting to 16 yr old Greta Thunberg from Sweden and the German, Belgian and Swiss student protesters she inspired are taking action to right the wrongs in their country and their world. On this one day, out of many in their school career, students who have learned these prized skills of responsibility and rigour are standing up for their future – and hitting the government where it hurts.

We should all listen to Greta Thunberg’s statement to the World Economic Forum: “I ask you to stand on the right side of history. I ask you to pledge to do everything in your power to push your own business or government in line with a 1.5C world.” After all, by the time these students are in power, it’ll be too late to change anything.