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Across the world Friday, students skipped class to protest their governments failure to take sufficient measures to curb climate change.
It all started with 16 year old Greta Thunberg of Sweden:
who began holding solitary demonstrations outside the Swedish parliament last year. Since then, the weekly protests have snowballed from a handful of cities to hundreds, fueled by dramatic headlines about the impact of climate change during the students' lifetime.
Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel peace prize for her efforts.
The protestors are calling for a list of anti-climate change actions and solutions including:
Our Demands
- Green New Deal
- A halt in any and all fossil fuel infrastructure projects
- All decisions made by the government be based on the best-available and most-current scientific research.
- Declaring a National Emergency on Climate Change
- Compulsory comprehensive education on climate change and its impacts throughout grades K-8
- Preserving our public lands and wildlife
- Keeping our water supply clean
Our Solutions
- The extraction of Greenhouse Gases from the atmosphere
- Emission standards and benchmarks
- Changing the agriculture industry
- Using renewable energy and building renewable energy infrastructure
- Stopping the unsustainable and dangerous process of fracking
- Stop mountaintop removal/mining
In a speech Friday outside the United Nations HQ in New York, Alexandria Villasenor, one of the founders of Youth Climate Strike U.S. said:
world leaders weren't listening. "Our world leaders are the ones acting like children," she said. "They are the ones having tantrums, arguing with each other and refusing to take responsibility for their actions while the planet burns."
At one of these planned protests a year or two back, permission forms were sent home in advance so kids could get parental permission to participate in skipping school and protesting. Kids who didn't participate were taunted and harassed by the other kids.
How does your school treat such events?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday March 16 2019, @02:07PM
Irony of ironies, this.
It's widely been written out of history of education, but a strong force in the so-called "high school movement" of the early to mid 1900s was to get politicized teenagers off the streets and to curb their dangerous impulses that could be politically disruptive (in the U.S., this was often framed in terms of concerns about socialists).
Prior to this time, most teens just went directly into the workforce after primary school (some even earlier). The major driving force for public education in the late 1800s had been training good industrial workers with basic skills like reading and arithmetic. Why should we waste time on the masses with high school, though?
Because new child labor restrictions meant it was getting more complicated to just work kids to death... meaning kids had more time, and youth back then (as today) were likely to be swept into radical ideologies and movements.
So, we jail them in schools to (1) give some "civics" instruction (indoctrination), and (2) break their spirits through structured time that discourages independent thought.
And now we apparently find it shocking that students will skip school for political protest!? This is the very reason we put them in schools in the first place -- to prevent this sort of dangerous radical nonsense!
Thanks to Arik for reminding us of the true roots of public education and its purpose. We definitely need to beat this crap down immediately.