The Future of Education

On February 15, 2019, inspired by Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who initiated the #FridaysforFuture protests each week outside Sweden’s parliament to compel political leaders to address climate change, young students by the tens of thousands took up the cause across Europe. Young people took to the streets with placards reading, “There is no planet B”, “Climate over capitalism”, “Respect your mother”, and more.  As reported in The Guardian (15 February 2019), an estimated 10,000+ students throughout the UK joined the strike, “defying threats of detention to voice their frustration at the older generation’s inaction on the environmental impact of climate change.” The protests were strongly endorsed in the UK by 224 academics who submitted an open letter to The Guardian ahead of the 15 February climate strike. It was also supported by the UK Labour leader, by Christiana Figueres, the former Executive Secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, by Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org., and others. However, a Downing Street spokesperson on behalf of the Prime Minister offered a less than enthusiastic account noting that “It is important to emphasise that disruption increases teachers’ workloads and wastes lesson time that teachers have carefully prepared for.” The statement further argued that such lesson time is “crucial” in terms of education that will develop “top scientists, engineers and advocates” to address the climate problem. Greta Thunberg’s tweeted in response that, speaking of time wasting, “political leaders have wasted 30 years of inaction.” The point of analytical departure for this paper is precisely the authoritarian critique and dismissal of the student action as wasting lesson time.  Indeed, this response, not at all isolated, is a summary account of all that is wrong with conservative educational/political philosophies, fundamentalisms, and practices that, as Henry Giroux has argued, “shrink” the spaces and capacities for “sustained and critical thought” (Giroux, 2017); that is, institutionalized imperatives that lack responsiveness, nimbleness, and most critically, relevance.  This activism of the young around environmental urgencies is enormously significant in retheorizing education, and this paper explores precisely this retheorization in terms of the urgencies of learning social and political engagement, social responsibility, citizenship, and instigations of change.  It considers a constellation of factors including, new and emergent technologies, the ongoing penetrating relevance of popular media and culture in pedagogy, an increasing activist consciousness among the young which necessarily takes them out of the bounded classroom—all foundational to the project of learning for real world consequences.

Keywords: Activism in education; engaged agency; responsive pedagogy;

References:
[1] Giroux, Henry (2017). “The Vital Role of Education in Authoritarian Times”, Truthout (October 2017). Accessed on March 1, 2019 at https://truthout.org/articles/the-vital-role-of-education-in-a-time-of-tyranny/