Climate and Punishment: power and the striking students
Schools are always double-edged: they liberate through education, but are also tools of conformity, coercion and compliance of the economic, political and social systems they are embedded within. Individual teachers and schools can be wonderful exceptions, and anyone with an iota of a free and critical mind is evidence of these, but the general rule remains: the school is an instrument to turn children into the citizens and workers that the dominant society of their time would most like to see. When the students (and, very often, their teachers and schools with them) come into conflict with that dominant society, retribution can be expected: harsh, swift, extreme even, to make an example of a larger principle — do not deviate from conformity. Do not bite the hand that feeds you. Do not try to stop climate breakdown when you live within fossil-dominated economies.
The immense and immensely successful international school strikes for climate are quickly becoming a textbook example of punishment for deviating from the party line. A few days ago, I wrote about the gaslighting of the climate-striking students by the most powerful people in their countries, chancellors & prime ministers. Here, I will just make a few brief points about the real, really real, and imagined punishments which with they are being threatened.
Sending a coercive message to the striking students
I do not want to list the punishments the students have been threatened with or subjected to, including detention, disciplinary measures, having their schools locked down against them, having their marks and records permanently marred. The general messages being sent, though, are quite important, and deserve being spelled out:
- By your actions, you do not belong to this school (i.e. this community, this economy, this society). You are no longer welcome. You are an outsider, an exile. The only way back into the fold is capitulation and compliance.
- Because you are fighting for your societies to address climate breakdown and ecological crises, you are no longer a “good” student (meaning: a good person, a good community member, a good citizen). We are punishing you to show we believe you are now “bad,” harmful. We are pointing the finger at you, calling you names like “skivers,” “waggers,” “lazy,” “bunking off.”
- Because you are using the colossally powerful tactic of a strike, we will harm your future prospects. We don’t want people with ideas and organizing capacities like yours to have good jobs or positions of influence in the future.
These messages are important, because they expose the role the schools are playing in being instruments of the dominant governments of this time, who themselves are the playthings of fossil capital.
Nothing exposes this quite so perfectly as this cartoon from the Courier-Mail in Australia, showing Bart Simpson as the dunce student, endlessly copying “coal is Australia’s biggest export” on a blackboard. All the elements are there: stultifying conformity, enforced compliance, with the goal of becoming a complicit tool, serving a fossil-fueled economy.
Climate and punishment
[This section is hard for me to write, as an educator and the mother of a young child. Onward.] The reality is, of course, that no punishment any of these schools can offer is worse than the disastrous future facing today’s students, whether climate-striking or not, under climate change and ecological crises. The real punishment is already in the pipeline, and these students have done nothing to deserve it, except being born at a dangerous time, with humanity and the planet at a crossroads.
The cold, hard fact is that those in power are already punishing all the students, shutting them out from any chance of a prosperous future. We are already experiencing a climate unknown to humanity, and by 2030 (if we continue on our current trajectory) or 2040 (if we reduce emissions drastically, in accordance with the latest IPCC report), we will have rolled back the planetary climate by 3 million years, to a time before homo anything ever walked the Earth. The devastating consequences of these changes are already around us: mega-storms, droughts, fires, floods, ecosystems collapsing, communities washed away, diminished crops, desperate people driven off their land. A future where blight and destruction are all around, led by the legendary four horsemen of disease, famine, war and death: doesn’t this sound like a punishment enough?
As Greta Thunberg states perfectly
Some say I should be in school. But why should any young person be made to study for a future when no one is doing enough to save that future? What is the point of learning facts when the most important facts given by the finest scientists are ignored by our politicians?
We are running out of time. Failure means disaster. The changes required are enormous and we must all contribute to the solutions, especially those of us in rich countries like Australia.
The adults have failed us. And since most of them, including the press and the politicians, keep ignoring the situation, we must take action into our own hands, starting today.
The real punishment is in doing nothing. The only way we, as grown-ups, can spare the striking students, is by supporting them, by joining them in taking action, by shifting those in power, whether they want to or not. And we have to do it fast. The only way we can protect our students and the children around us is by joining in this, their fight for the future, in any and all ways possible.
