Not surprisingly for anyone who knows anything about my research interests, I’ve been following the school climate strike quite closely. Firstly, I think it’s an incredible event and social movement; getting all those people out on strike is a challenge even for seasoned organisers is a challenge. For students to do it is even more impressive. It’s truly a worldwide movement of children calling on their governments to act.
I went to the climate strike at Sydney Town Hall, and there were some really interesting points. The first was that, while the organisers were glad of the presence of other green groups and unions, they went to great pains to point out that this was their protest and their action – it was school student led and organised.
The second interesting point was how clear they were about their demands. I’m curious about what advice and guidance the students had received, and how they formulated these demands, but there was no doubt that they had very clear and well defined demands for government. They were: to put a stop to Adani, to become completely renewable by 2030, and for there to be no new coal mining or power stations (I think) in the future. It’s easy to argue back and forth about the merits of each of these positions, and their achievability – but I think that misses the point that these young people clearly had a grasp on the issues; this was no vague protest. Sometimes I think more seasoned social movement campaigners might learn from this.
However, the part that got really interesting for me was the intersection of external groups – both supportive and not – and the members of the climate strike. I think a lot of it was played out in the press and via social media. The usual suspects made all kinds of argument about when and where students should be protesting, or whether it was actually a genuine strike (as students weren’t technically at work), whether it was effective or not.
More disappointingly, however, were some voices that might argue that they were genuinely progressive – and even some of those were educational voices – suggesting that this was not the right way to act in civil society. Some of these voices cited lost learning time, or the importance of showing respect, or the foolishness of parents being involved. Others suggested that a Saturday protest would cause more disruption.
This is something that I think we’re beginning to see more and more of in the fractured – even splintered – educational sphere. I’m not precisely ambivalent about it, but I am interested in the discussion that appears to be taking place. There appears to be a confusion about the role of teachers and, indeed, education as a whole. This confusion infiltrates other discussions about related issues, like the purpose of assessment and the role of teachers, but I think it all stems back to this central question: what is the purpose of education?
Gert Biesta has written a lot about this, and he is quick to point out that there is a difference between learning and education; one of his arguments – and it’s a good one – is that education has a moral dimension. That is, at some point, someone has decided that this particular thing is good or important for young people to learn. I guess that’s part of the reason why we study coding, for example, but not astrology. At some point, the NSW government has said that coding is good, astrology not so much.
This argument extends well beyond curriculum choices, too. If you look at documents like the Melbourne Declaration, it explicitly sets out a range of skills, knowledges and attitudes that young people are expected to develop over the course of their education. They are meant to become informed and active citizens, for example.
And this is where the splintering comes in; if we agree with those goals of education, then necessarily we must recognise that such goals need to be nurtured and developed. It’s quite easy to identify how and where calculus or Shakespeare is taught, but it’s an entirely more challenging matter to determine how and where we encourage active citizenship. Or even what that active citizenship might look like in a school setting.
This confusion about these grey areas relating to the purpose of education means that they are often ignored – or considered too hard. After all, how do you have a standardised, international test on whether young people are engaged in sustainability and care for their national environments? And if you can’t have a standardised test, how on earth do you sell schools and school systems curricular materials and lesson plans to assist them prepare?