Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A growing number of Australian students are demonstrating their commitment to climate issues, by embracing a future career of low paid menial jobs.
“We Can’t Sit Around”: Aussie Students Are Skipping School to Combat Climate Change
Sarah Basford
Nov 12, 2018In the short time 14-year-old Jean Hinchliffe has been on this planet, she’s already done more than most adults to prevent it from being irreparably destroyed.
Thankfully, she’s not alone.
This November, school children around the country will be taking the day (or many days) off school and heading to Parliament Houses, MP offices or anywhere they can be heard in an effort to force our politicians into taking climate change seriously. They’re calling it School Strike for Climate Change.
“We can’t sit around waiting until we’re in power because it’s gonna be too late,” Jean explains to Student Edge with urgency.
“We need to make a difference and take action as soon as we possibly can.”
…
“When we’re striking from school, it’s very difficult to ignore us,” Jean says.
“As young people, we can’t vote, we can’t make a difference in that sense so we’ve gotta find some other way of making a change.”
…
The majority of the strikes will take place on 30 November, but Jean insists the campaign won’t fizzle out after that. It’s here to stay until something changes.
“We know we’re not going to step down right after the strike,” Jean cautions.
“It’s just the beginning.”
…
Its sad these young people are going to have to learn the hard way, that holding their breath until their faces turn purple only works on their parents.
Sarah Basford supports students dropping out of high school, or younger, to protest something or other.
i.e.; Sarah is another fanatic desiring the end of education and knowledge. That power may be contained in a small group of like minded elites deciding how the lower classes will live.
Pathetic small minded activists pretending they are reporters.
Make them a bargain. We cut off all the heat and light in the school and make them walk, saving tons and tons of CO2. OK?
So, immediately cut off all use of fossil fuels. In about two days the grocery stores will start running out of food.
Totally agree
I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of students view this as little more than a day without school.
MarkW
And the teachers get a day off from the precocious, whining little ingrates.
As pointed out above.
Yep, not far until the Xmas break, and keeping the little buggers occupied while trying to get everything else done, exams marked, reports written etc etc was a real PITA !!
Well glad I’m out of that job.
Fred250
I believe marking in the UK is now done offshore in some cases. Teachers aren’t even trusted to assess their own pupils.
Nor is education everything. Many of our nations successful entrepreneurs are ill educated. Richard Branson is dyslexic so struggled at school as it was undiagnosed; Alan Sugar started business life selling car aerials in a market stall as a kid; Graham Kirkham, the founder of the DFS furniture empire; John Caudwell, the mobile phone boss who gave up on A-levels and founded Phones4U (sold and now no longer operating); and someone who fascinates me, Simon Dolan who left school with, from memory, a single GCSE. He was unemployed at 23 and living off credit cards before spending his last £10 placing an advert to complete peoples tax returns.
From that he built an accountancy empire with a branch in every major UK town and city in the UK. He’s a kickboxer title holder, and won his class in his own team (Jota motorsports) LMP2 at Le Mans with him as one of three drivers. He’s now branched out and owns Jota Aviation http://flyjota.com/
He’s also written a book “How To Make Millions Without A Degree: And How to Get by Even If You Have One“.
Not bad for a bloke with fewer qualifications than even I have.
Folks willing to better themselves will find a thousand and one opportunities. Folks waiting for others to make things better for them will find a thousand and one excuses.
When I was 14, I went surfing instead of going to school. Now that, I could understand.
As long as they are committed to believing that all of modernity is due to most people being “victimized” in some (however small) way, then they (leftists) will always have an axe to grind, and always a reason to protest, and make trouble.
Blame these, blame those. It doesnt work! Ihad 6 kids and added two nieces that weren’t being looked after for a few years. I was strongly involved in their education including removing them from one particularly bad school. I put three of them in a no nonsense old Catholic school in the city (they weren’t Catholics so I had to convince the principal). One, who wanted to drop out, I put in a private school (older siblings were a lot tougher) this one is now a physics prof. Expenses for all of this (add music, ballet, martial arts, hockey,figure skating and horseback riding- we had a farm) were enormous. They were smart kids and I taught them a better grade of math, argued points with them from the stuff they were being taught, introduced them to classic literature, chess (l actually wasn’t that good at it myself) ingrained in them to think for themselves and a heck of a lot more. They arent part of the polcor brigade.
Gary Pearse
Top man!
But you must be exhausted. 🙂
This might be an interesting homework assignment for these budding idealists: from the end of school on Friday to the start of school on Monday, each student will not use any item associated with fossil fuel. This will include food (which was transported to the store by truck), transport (they walk home on Friday, then walk to school on Monday) and do not use electricity (no refrigerated products, microwave, electric/gas appliances & lights, cell phones or TV). An essay on that experience to be handed in on Wednesday morning.
They are children. Irresponsible, immature, naive children. Take away their video games and cell phones until they do what they are told and return to school. The rest of us can, and should, ignore them.
I wonder who initiated the brainwashing of these unsuspecting pawns.
I was referring to the striking children. Who is most proximate to the activating of their minds towards striking? Who made the suggestion? Was it suggested to one student who relayed the suggestion, or was a meeting called to indoctrinate a group of students to start such striking behavior?
We’re raising a generation of activists that can’t separate social awareness from politics. Very dangerous.
Not at all there is arguably as many being raised on the right and it just makes noise. The only real danger is it getting so bad one group deciding to put the others against the wall as sometimes has happened in history.
I am old enough to remember my classes praying every morning in public school. I remember the Supreme Court decision that was used as an excuse to get rid of that practice.
I remember seeing (in public school) misbehaving classmates get “swats” in front of the class. That was a time when the child who was punished also got punished at home as well. Parents supported the teachers’ and administrators’ efforts to keep discipline in the classroom. I didn’t see firsthand the reversal of that behavior. I did hear, after graduating high school, that they had removed the stall doors in the students’ bathrooms because smoking and worse were happening behind closed doors.
I remember a healthy culture of competition in my schools. There was only one valedictorian and one salutatorian in each graduating class.
I graduated a year early due to my family’s intent to move sometime during my junior year. I didn’t want to take my senior year in a strange school, and I had taken a class the previous summer just so I would have something to do with my time, so it turned out that I had enough credits to graduate as a junior. I graduated when I was 16. I was eager to move away from home and do “real stuff”…even though it was in college. 😉
When I was a freshman in college, a friend and I went to another college town where there was a much larger library on campus. I didn’t find what I was looking for at the library, but my friend and I stopped by a record shop in that town. While I was there, I saw a classmate that I didn’t realize had also graduated a year early. When I hailed her by name, she turned glazed eyes in my direction and said “Hi” in an obvious drug-induced stupor. She didn’t really seem to recognize me, even though we had had many classes together in high school and junior high.
I was shocked to see what had become of her. I would have sworn that she would have come out as valedictorian or salutatorian when she graduated. Now I have no idea what happened to her. She was not only intelligent, but also good looking and popular. She had a lot going for her. What a waste of a young, promising life…just at the point where women were starting to make inroads into non-traditional professions.
Since that time, I have wondered if the Powers That Be didn’t allow the drug culture to have free run because they knew it would remove many promising young people from the competition they planned for their own kids to win.
I can’t help but believe today’s online culture has been tailored to do the same thing to young, promising lives.
These days, when college students will gather to watch one of their peers struggle to figure out how to use a manual can opener for 10 minutes (or more), and then give her a standing ovation when she finally figures it out–I just shake my head.
I understand that TPTB will refuse to turn away from 24/7/365 online connectivity because it means better surveillance of the proletariat (does anyone use that word anymore?), but I think the real revolution needs to be away from trying to automate everything….
Not fair. Do you know how the schools are attacking this? They tell the kids that their parents are old and don’t understand and don’t “get” what is really going on…Unless you mean you blame them for sending the kids to school…
https://thefederalist.com/2018/10/26/public-schools-indoctrinate-kids-without-almost-anyone-noticing/
Obviously, school isn’t very important. The adults who are organizing the children think politics is way more important. This is a political stunt, the children are props. The children will repeat what they are told to repeat. Imagine the peer pressure. It isn’t science class, its religion.
There’s a new snowflake born every minute.
Getup is the criminal anti-civilisation organisation leading the charge to pollute the youth. They are already planning a campaign to teach kids to report their parents for offences against the climate
When I was younger than these students, 8 and less, I was studying this planet, the sun and others in our solar system not worrying about what might be happening to global climate (It was called weather then). That was nearly 50 years ago. We were told the climate was to changed to an ice age and then we were told to a hot house, where humans were in perpetual war over resources, not being able to feed ourselves by about year 2000. 40 years to year 2000, the climate and planet are fine. Nearly 20 years after year 2000, the climate and planet are fine.
I look out the window and go outside and all is fine with the world. There are people trying to wreck that. These students need to get out more and away from “social media” and their smart devices.
So the movie “Idiocracy” changes from fiction to prophesy!
Ha,ha on us, they’re Aussie teenagers, they’ve gone to the beach for some spring surfin’…..
Aussie teens these days can’t break away from their smart devices and social media, my kids can barely tear themselves away from wi-fi for dinner let alone any physical activity.
Again, ‘Strike’.
You keep using that word. Somehow I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Also, if they DID understand the implications of striking they might realise that in the modern world there is declining union membership for the simple reason most people are better off without it.
So, with no union protection/bullying to back them up, unless you are using your own leave, employers are COMPLETELY within their rights to dismiss you for non attendance. Think of the scene. Little Jean turns up to school on the next Monday only to discover a new student is using her desk. Sorry, Jean. We didn’t think you were coming back so we replaced you. HR has your separation forms.
Now that would be funny.
The other thing that narks me about this neo-millennial entitled attitude is the utter selfish arrogance of it all.
The claim is ‘we are the future and WE need action to protect our future before OLD PEOPLE destroy it.’
Well lets look at that for a bit. I am currently 40 something and this selfish entitled sprog is about 30 years younger than me. Assuming we both live to 100 our lives will overlap for 70 years. Now if we ignore her younger years and place her ‘we are the future’ ego trip as started about now, then for 55 or so of those 70 years she expects to be in charge because people like me, despite the fact we also will be living in exactly the same environment, are too stupid to know what a real environment is and are actively hoping to roll around in sun bleached slag heaps the rest of our lives.
Jean and her little friends are selfish entitled control freaks and quite frankly she should start learning from people with actual life experiences behind them or get use to a low wage career in hospitality.
Get STEM or Get Coffee.
Well they will be a huge asset to climate science non believers when climate change believers can rightfully be dismissed as the view of ignorant uneducated morons.
I don’t get it. Here we have Australia’s politicians doing their very best to bankrupt the country by attempting to rely on windmills and industrial solar to supply their electrical power and some Australian school kids think their politicians are not going down the road to ruin fast enough!
I wonder if anyone ever told the kids or the politicians that their complete curtailing of fossil fuel burning in Australia won’t make a bit of difference in the greater scheme of things.
China and India will offset any Australian CO2 reductions in a matter of weeks or months with increased CO2 output, and China and India can increase their output as much as they desire from now until the year 2030.
Australia’s efforts to reduce CO2 are a very damaging waste of time. Someone ought to clue the school kids and the politicians in before they really screw things up.
This is what Aussie pollies want;
https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/electricity-grid-batteries-houses-state-nsw-20181113-p50fsy.html?loginAction=%5Bobject%20Object%5D