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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The SMH has published a letter from students explaining why they have decided to go on strike. But in my opinion this strike action is a symptom of a deeper malaise within the Australian education system.
Why we’re striking from school over climate change inaction
By Harriet O’Shea Carre & Milou Albrecht
31 October 2018 — 11:53pmIt seems ridiculous that children have got to the point where they realise that the adults who are supposed to be in charge aren’t doing enough to protect our futures from dangerous climate change. So, we have decided to strike from school to show them that this simply isn’t good enough.
There are already so many solutions to climate change but our politicians aren’t doing enough to put them in place. Instead, they are approving massive new coal mines, such as Adani’s, that will wreck our future. As children, we are going to be living in this hot world far longer than the adults. This is just not fair.
…
We feel sorry for the future generations who don’t even get a say in the world that we’re creating, who will have to deal with even more extreme weather, who will never get to see the Great Barrier Reef and other threatened icons and species.
…
Remember back when schools were places of education? Nowadays far too many schools in Australia have become places of indoctrination rather than places of learning.
From what I have seen those poor kids have likely had their minds twisted by years of relentless Australian climate propaganda, force fed to them by teachers and other authority figures.
You reap what you sow. The children are simply carrying their educational brainwashing to its logical but false conclusion; what is the point of attending school or doing your homework, if the world is about to end?
Using children, especally those under your care, for your political purposes is the most scumbag tactic possible. The children are not doin ghtis, the teachers are, they only repeat what they have been indoctrinated with.
Expect childre denouncong their parents for climate crimes in the future.
Billy Bob McKibben is an expert at having kids as young as 5 turned into photo ops/props.
Yes, and what are young teacher students being brain-washed with at the Teacher’s Colleges that makes them to think this sort of behavior is OK, and they shouldn’t get sacked for it? Oh that’s right it’s a State education system.
OK, well where are the parents then? Have they no say, do they not intend to do anything about these out of control ‘teachers’?
The ‘teachers’ keep getting away with it because the ‘parents’ keep letting them.
Re: we’re not doing enough to protect future generations, what did previous generations do to protect us? Nada! Squat! For example, they denuded the British Isles in their relentless cutting of trees to make fires to heat their homes and feed themselves. Did they give us a thought in doing so? Did they sit around the fire agonizing over the consequences of habitat destruction and land erosion? Did they set up committees? And lastly, did their children go on strike from school? No, they were too busy just trying to stay alive, that is, until the industrial revolution and the discovery of cheap, abundant fossil fuel energy which gave everybody enough free time to sit around and grapple with non problems like climate change.
WXcycles – October 31, 2018 at 4:41 pm
WXcycles, that was a redundant question. The answer to it is the same as above, ….. “Oh that’s right it’s a State education system.”
Those young parents along with the young teachers were all being brain-washed during their school attendance years from kindergartner thru high school and college.
There has been 40 years of PC brainwashing in the schools, so even the grandparents of many of the current and past students …… believe what the current crop of teachers believe.
Exactly why there isn’t a si gle person under 30 worth listening to on any serious subjects.
I was an ignoramus until around 28 years, and even then my knowledge was restricted to specific periods of history and philosophy.
Who Believes in the Concept of Coincidence in these Divisive Days?
I am fairly sure it has precedent in other communist regimes
C’mon! The ‘kids’ didn’t initiate this crap – Their socialist teachers did.
J Mac
Precisely why children should be seen and not heard.
My children were subject to this crap. When I passed a comment one day on the climate change rhetoric being nonsense my daughter (16 or so at the time) was in tears accusing me of calling her teacher a liar.
I asked her who was more likely to lie to her, me or her teacher (a cruel ploy I know) but she came to her senses.
I was subject to political crap from my schoolteachers, I recognise it 45 years later, and I was affected by their liberal outlook, but I also, eventually, came to my senses.
What we, and they (teachers, nurses, policemen, firemen etc.) must also remember is that whilst they like to buck the system because they ‘don’t get paid enough’ (socialist’s never believe they are paid enough) and subvert children’s education because of their bitterness, they should add roughly 30% to their salaries as they benefit from a handsome state pension, assuming they live long enough to capitalise on it.
Yes, it’s the teachers influence, but it’s our fault if our children are indoctrinated into something we know to be wrong, or worse still, can’t be bothered to research ourselves.
By the international convention on human rights, we are individually responsible for our children’s welfare, not teachers, and certainly not politicians. It’s our duty to intervene in unacceptable school practices and I have the dubious accolade of being banned from entering my daughters school premises, for one day, until the authorities heard my case, at which point not only the ban was lifted but over the following year or so, I was instrumental in having the head teacher removed from the school.
No one fucks with my kids, but they are well aware that unless they can present a case (they are now far better educated than me) they remain seen but not heard, particularly on climate and political issues. Which makes me sound tyrannical, but I’m not as my eldest is Masters educated in Zoology and treats the greens with disdain, only partly because of me.
I also had an experience, having had the privilege of raising four children and reluctantly guiding them through an intellectually and politically corrupted school system here in The Netherlands.
In one case, my eldest son was obliged to join the class going to a cinema to watch Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth (what a misnomer). I restricted myself to writing a letter of objection to the school director, knowing that playing it harder would be a losing proposition.
In another case, I have coached my daughter in making a factual summary of the climate issue to be orally presented for her English class. An enjoyable endeavor that was, condensing the vast body of material to its barest essence while keeping it simple at the same time.
I’m glad I don’t have kids. No way would I want them indoctrinated in the Public school systems of today (it was bad enough when I was going to public school and it’s only gotten massively worse since then). It would have to be either be a quality private school (expensive) or homeschooling (time intensive).
I, and the rest of those in my age group, had the great good fortune to have people from the “greatest generation” for parents as well as for school teachers. As a bonus item of good fortune, I had all four of my grandparents and two of my great-grandparents still living until I was well into adulthood.
Additionally, I had the luck-of-the-draw that enabled me to grow up as a redneck, hillbilly country whose world was a place that was based on truth and reality for anyone who was going to make it through and out the other side.
I regret that my grand children are unlikely to have the same good fortune.
You can bet it will be on a Monday or Friday, so the teachers get a long weekend 🙂
Some day these ‘kids” will become the leaders which is the socialist agenda.
Expand acronyms the first time you use them. It is the Sydney Morning Herald? or is it Shaking My Yoni?
+10
Only with the appropriate feminist head=gear.
Smack My Head is abetter acronym for that rag.
Thank you.
Stupid Morons Here.
Something Meaningless Heralded
Dear Students in Australia
Just a short note to let you know that you are all failing your current grade and will have to repeat it next year due to the stupidity of your teacher in not informing you of the consequences of your chosen actions regarding Climate Change inaction within your country.
Your options will be:
Continue on your chosen path and sacrifice your education in the name of climate change activism
Fail your current grade and have to repeat it next year
Attend summer school for the next several years to Make-Up the missing credits
Stop listening to your Climate Activist teachers and continue your schooling so you can graduate and not have to subsist on minimum wage labor jobs
Shaking My Head, I mean.
i looked up yoni (not literally) … I am now even more curious about the typo.
More of a Freudian brain-fart
You forgot option 3, go out to the fields to pick weeds like your ancestors did….for their entire lifetimes.
In the UK parents get fined if their children are taken out of school for holidays during term-time.
Are the teachers going to be fined for doing the same?
Not in the USA they won’t be fined.
All School Calendars denote all “holidays”, ….. national, state or whatever, …. as “no-school” days, including Thanksgiving week break, …. Christmas week break …… and a week of Spring Break.
Plus, all school employees have 7 or 10 days of “sick leave” each school year, ….. as well a 7 or 10 days of “personal leave” each school year.
One of the biggest “items” in many school’s yearly budget ……. is the cost of/for Substitute Teachers.
And in most cases the cost for Substitute teachers is basically buying a babysitter for the class while the real teacher is out. Subs rarely do any teaching, they’re just there to make sure the kids don’t run amok.
Right you are.
And here are a few typical facts:
And the Teachers get paid for their days absent no matter if its their “sick days” or “personal days”.
Children being miseducated decide not to go to skool? That seems like a step in the right direction, actually.
“We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control,
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave those kids alone”
They just want to be bricks in the wall.
The sooner government schools are closed, the better. The Prussians invented them as a way to create compliant drones for their factories, and the SJWs took them over to create compliant drones to vote for SJWs.
There’s no good reason to send kids to a school every day when they can learn everything they need to know on the Internet. And no sane parent would send their kids out every day to be indoctrinated by SJWs.
They “learn” nothing on the internet. They are just regurgitating what others write. And it is then forgotten. Unless you know the basics and have some critical thinking skills, you will stay a drone.
They can “learn” a lot on the internet (mostly stuff most parents wouldn’t want them to learn) 😉
From reading the article, it appears the strike is by all of two students. What’s the odds it’s their parents behind this?
You mean progeny-pimping notariety whores?
Surely not. 😎
Maybe that should read; progeny-pimping public perception prostitutes?
There you go, now I have to take another P somewhere…🗑
3rd try: Progeny-Pimping Public Perception Prostituted Parents.
Another P before the drive home always helps.
Pop,
Ya got me! Truly ‘laughing out loud’!
Thanks!
Nah, look at the date. If you ask me the (2 sibling) students don’t give a stuff about ‘climate change’ but are simply looking for a believable excuse for them not to turn up to school in that boring period between end of exams and the end of term, and get brownie points for their ‘virtue signalling’ at the same time. And being siblings they are not going to snitch on each other, are they? Bonus points: This creates something of a moral dilemma for their no doubt ‘deep green’ teachers if they want to punish them, eh?
Going on strike to protest inaction… lol!
I’m assuming all the kids walk to school to eliminate “carbon”…(uphill both ways & Australian snowdrifts, etc)?
Javert Chip
The reason kids don’t walk to school is because parents have been terrorised by the media into believing the journey is lined with crack dealing junkies and paedophiles.
The walk to and from school was a journey of discovery in itself for me.
Yes. One of the big mistakes was wrapping kids in cotton wool the last couple of generations and now the little frightened chickens are coming home to roost and demanding safe passage through life.
It is obvious that education isn’t doing any good anyway so they may as well go on strike for life.
I was thinking, this is like a pack of layabouts in day care threatening that they’re going to stop showing up for day care. Boo hoo, whatever shall we do.
It is obvious that the “education” they have received thus far is the cause of their actions. Go on “strike” just means that their “teachers” will not be doing additional harm for a short while.
In a world of instant info, we still have to deal with the Dark Ages. I will never forget the imagery of the young 20-year old girl in a crying fit protesting shortly after the election of Trump. She reminded me of my own daughter except this gal was crazed that the world was going to end within 10 years because of climate change and the wrong person is now President. I feel like we should be suing people/groups for something like climatology malpractice. We’ll need the proceeds for psychotherapy for millions of kids.
It’s unconscionable what we are doing to our children unnecessarily filling them with fear, lies, and bad science.
MM
It is, in my opinion, child abuse and will at some time be recognized as that.
M Montgomery
The backlash from our youth relative to climate change is coming.
Kids hate being told what to do.
Yes, they do hat being told what to do – sometimes.
But they are prone to indroctrination where the educational system itself instills bad thinking practices. Their parents have been subjected to exactly the same practices and wouldn/t notice.
In particular, they are being taught to emote rather than engage in thinking. Proper thinking would be fact-based conceptual thinking and that it precisely what is being undermined by the ANTI-conceptual teaching practices.
The result is SJW, eco-ignoramism and other modern religious creeds.
For those interested in improving education, I found the lectures of Leonard Peikoff “The Philosophy of Education” extremely valuable. (“Close down the teacher’s colleges!”)
“Kids hate being told what to do”. So what is the alternative? Being lead by competent educators is a start but unfortunately college educated teachers are already filled with the indoctrination tools to use. Not good. Maybe 10% of students will self-educate. The rest? Not so much.
Knowledge can be given. Wisdom must be earned.
The Millennial generation has easier access to the entire breadth of human knowledge than any other in human history, yet exhibits an alarming lack of even the most basic aspects of worldly wisdom. Every parent wishes otherwise, but it seems in the end that many life lessons have to be learned the hard way.
Hopefully before they end up in the hospital, or prison.
I see wisdom as the application of observed information through through the foresight of hindsight.
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on Me.”
Wise people seek out all possible outcomes before commiting to an action.
Actually, schools have always taught values. Schools are usually governed by some kind of state or provincial education act. The act won’t use the word ‘indoctrinate’, it will say inculcate.
Schools are supposed to inculcate values like hard work, punctuality, good citizenship, etc. Pretty much everyone can agree with that. When they go further the problems start.
At least they used to learn math, classic literature, culture, history grammar… when I was a schoolboy 4 generations ago values were generally cleanliness (there were no antibiotics), fair play, honesty, charity, indystry and effort, thoughtfulness….I dont recall being taught anything political as a child. It was with my own children, that I began to see the liwering of standards an the marginalization of the smart kids, and the sociological blame game.
Strike?
You keep using that word. Somehow I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Maybe if Victoria wasn’t a dystopia their education system would teach these kids that a strike is a denial of supply. What exactly are these kids refusing to supply? Stress to their teachers?
A denial of usage would be a boycott.
These kids are idiots and Fairfax should realise how stupid they look for treating this remotely seriously.
The only promising thing to come out of this letter is “This is just not fair”. Well done kids, you have finally discovered something useful. Welcome to life.
Children supply money to the educational system, as the amount of money each school receives is based on head count.
MarkW
Teachers still get paid. It’s a few days off for them, and the kids ‘strike’ denies nothing to anyone but themselves.
Craig is right, it’s a boycott, not a strike.
The kids are supplying a place for teachers to put information – call it learning. Since they clearly didn’t learn anything useful in their previous education experience it is extremely doubtful anyone will notice their absence. It certainly won’t effect the student(s) one way or the other!
Unfortunately for the (what seems to be two) students involved the internet is forever.
Come a few years time when they throw themselves into the job market this little stunt is going to be relatively easy to find for any employer wanting to do a casual background check.
Unless they are trying to join The Greens can anyone think of a job where being a self centred troublesome teenager is going to be looked at positively?
You assume they (the seemingly only two would-be climate warriors) will enter the job market rather than live in their parents basement as they live their lives one protest after another holding up “this rump is temporarily closed” signs and providing nothing useful to society.
Parents and grandparents need to take a huge role in kid’s education. They aren’t learning math, science, and their own language, history and culture on top of the brainwashing. Don’t blame the teachers, they have to do as they are told. If and when you get rid of the “progressive” government (I know there is no real right of center left in Australia as in Europe, so it won’t be easy). US was lucky to get an iconoclast in who didnt please the left or right. He’s pretty much destroyed both.
We feel sorry for the future generations who don’t even get a say in the world that we’re creating, who will have to deal with even more extreme weather, who will never get to see the Great Barrier Reef and other threatened icons and species.
I feel incredibly sorry for future generations if the evil, greedy green blob gets it’s way and there is a socialist UN world government. I shudder to imagine such a disgusting possibility and will fight to my last breath to prevent this from occurring.
“Please don’t say that because we are children we can’t think for ourselves and that we’ve been brainwashed.”
Well, you are children, and you obviously can’t think for yourselves and have been brainwashed. None of what you claim has any basis in reality, and you’ve obviously been coached to say those things.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
“Please don’t say that because we are children we can’t think for ourselves and that we’ve been brainwashed.”
Let’s take their word for it and give them the benefit of the doubt on this one … it’s not because they are children, it’s because they are emotionally stunted and stupid.
Tell the truth, kids, you haven’t done your homework. I admire your ingenious excuse to evade repercussions, but you need to get it done and get back into school.
For once, the family pets don’t take the rap.
At some point average global temperature is going to stop going up if it hasn’t already.
Temperature is now about what it was in 2002. CO2 has increased since 2002 by 40% of the increase 1800 to 2002.
I wonder what these kids are going to think about this lesson after Mother Nature shows them reality.
Perhaps out university Arts students could all go on strike for three years. This will improve their education outcomes no end and may give them some time to develop at least a modicum of commonsense.
For these boycotting idiots (they don’t know the difference between a boycott and a strike so don’t bother lecturing me I am not listening!) They could make contribution by walking to school (Daddy’s car is probably powered by fossil fuels and was certainly built using them), buses and trains likewise, give up all their devices. They use power , don’t you know, and god forbid it comes from coal. Meanwhile all those internal components in the devices were almost certainly made in China by coal fired power so get rid of them. Otherwise, its not fair!
Embarrassing that they are Australian students from Australian schools. I apologise but then I had a Maths education and the social justice warriors haven’t managed to mess that subject up yet.
Don’t forget to take off all their clothes, since they are almost certainly made from petroleum.
I apologise but then I had a Maths education and the social justice warriors haven’t managed to mess that subject up yet.
I suspect you’ll find all kinds of SJW nonsense embedded in the written maths questions of their maths textbooks.
“Jane is gender fluid, how many of the 57 different genders can xe be?”
Oz does indeed appear to be upside-down from the conservative American fly-over states.
Time for these girls to read some Mother Goose.
Mother Goose on Climate Prediction
As record winds blow
Unprecedented snow,
Oh, where is our globe a’ warming?
That depends on the sun
And the ways oceans run,
Plus clouds (with complexity) forming!
Now, for quite long,
Climate models are wrong.
So, what caused the pause in the warming?
Yes, look to the sun,
The ways oceans run,
And the clouds, in complexity forming.
CO2 is “too small”
To stop temperature’s fall
When the sun, clouds and oceans together,
Begin to cause cold
In cycles so old…
No one alive can remember!
So if I do some harm
By just keeping warm,
You’ll have to kindly forgive me!
I find my solution
Makes carbon pollution;
Lest Gaia 🌎 too quickly outlives me!
Poor kids? Nonsense. These silly girls (and it’s always girls), are punishing adults for not getting what they think they are entitled, as well as virtue signalling how ‘caring’ they are. They are clueless and disconnected from the real world. First, they wrongly assume human-kind knows anything about how our climate changes; second, they ignore the reality of real existential dangers, like national economics, energy poverty, world conflicts, and globalsm. This ‘strike’ will be widely ignored by their peers, and be seen for the foolishness it is.
I agree 99.5%.
I’m not sure how quickly this will be seen as foolish by their peers and I fear repetition.
“…There are already so many solutions to climate change…”
Bwahahahaha!
As far as it’s solvable, it’s not a problem. As far as it’s a problem, it’s not solvable.
This is what happens when there are too many leftists in the classrooms and at the curriculum branch. They feel it’s their duty to feed them only one viewpoint instead of encouraging them to examine several and then decide which of these is most credible. Actually it’s the parents who should be taking the system to task for this type of propaganda since it’s their kids who are being brainwashed and with taxpayers’ money.
The big kids just have to whip up a logo or two and abracadabra instant affordable, reliable Green power for the the littleys in future-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/fair-dinkum-power-pm-inspires-atlassian-co-founder-to-create-pro-renewables-brand/ar-BBP9LU4
The infantilization of Oz education has been going on for a long time. Atlassian shrugs.
I’m not sure students can go on strike. Don’t you need a job first?
This Andrew Bolt article shows where a generation of “climate change” brainwashing of Australian school children has lead.
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/and-not-one-journalist-cried-thats-nuts/news-story/2e6b56012ad47349677f23b076e33bd7
Published, thanks for the tip.
A Castlemaine street poster, 2014 – When indoctrination replaces education:
http://tinypic.com/r/24d1ma9/9
There’s only one way to describe that – child abuse. And the perps need to be prosecuted.