Striking Students
Striking Students
David Cooke, 22 Nov 2024
The Hikoi protesting the Treaty Principles Bill has been a useful opportunity for the National School Attendance Monitor to tell students to go to school. Some students had -- gasp -- joined the hikoi during school time.
David Seymour has form in this area. In April, he told us that students should go to school, not to the School Strike for Climate. It was fairly predictable. Attendance was part of the popular discontent he stirred up in order to win the election, so he was delivering on that front.
In a kind of grapeshot attack on the climate activists, Seymour reckoned kids cut short their own learning, ran risks to mental health, depression and anxiety, and wouldn't fix the climate. These were all admirably bold claims.
Meanwhile, climate action will continue, students will strike again, and David Seymour will be happy to criticise them for doing so. So in the spirit of critical education, here's a look at his case and how he makes it.
Seymour ushers in one of the oldest tricks in the trade – distractions. First off, poverty. Students seem to be unaware of poor people, "billions of poor people in the world." They live in absolute poverty.
They need solutions and the answer is the second distraction: technology. That and science will help the poor to feed themselves without damaging climate.
We would all love a tech-fix to problems of food and climate. Seymour gets his from comedian/satirist and social critic, Konstantin Kisin, speaking at an Oxford Union debate. Technology comes out tops as a cure and has the added advantage that it plays down the need for Western countries to act against climate change.
Moving on, Seymour then finds a third distracting front in "capricious adults" winding up young people and stirring up an epidemic of depression and anxiety in kids' lives. Presumably, the idea is that students are so ridden with angst, they've lost their ability to reason.
So not much kudos to the marchers, but also a sign of just how much Seymour carefully manages to miss the point.
But in the NZ Herald, Jamie Morton captures the views of 22 NZ scientists and academics, who very clearly do get the point.
If I was 16, I'd be terrified by the behaviour of adults in politics and the media
Prof Niki Harre, Auckland
They will spend their lives trying to put right our wrongs and this is a massive task.
Dr Mike Joy, Victoria University
[The students' message] should unsettle us all into action
Dr Sylvia Nissen, Lincoln University
The young people are frustrated because the adults aren't listening. The narrative has focused on "wagging" rather than climate change itself.
Jacob Anderson, The Sir Peter Blake Trust
Now, as David Attenborough says, the risk of a collapse of our civilisation,
and the extinction of much of the natural world, is on the horizon.
Prof Ralph Chapman, Victoria University
The student strikers racked up a series of gains. First they captured national attention for an issue that becomes stymied. In doing so, they presented a sharp, public focus on social and political issues. And they demonstrated a clear ability to organise very successfully, in the face of obvious, expected disapproval.
In short, they reflected well on the education system: the ability and energy to think critically, challenge society, prioritise issues, consider their place in the world, see beyond themselves, look ahead, and combine knowledge from different sources. One fears these qualities were lost on Seymour.
Yet ironically, Seymour drew attention to some of their strengths, though without recognising them. He quotes students saying the march was "about saving their lives." This seems like a reasonable idea, and one wonders what Seymour thinks about it.
Seymour noted that the strikers raised issues like the Treaty, climate change and war in the Middle East, all matters of urgent social justice. That suggested a level of knowledge and understanding, along with political courage.
So Seymour's piece implies two distinctly different views on education and society. His own is a fairly traditional frame, in which students know their place is to sit at the feet of the teacher. The other is the students' concept, in which they combine their school education with their own learning from society and from each other – learning in and beyond the classroom.
In this case, their message was to shake up the rest of us in recognising that everyone's future is in imminent danger.
So they went beyond Seymour's recipe for addressing climate change ("maths, science, technology and business"). The students took on society, a daunting project. But of course Seymour may well take the same position as the Iron Lady that there's no such thing as society.
David Cooke was formerly at Unitec and York University, Toronto
