Starting with Greta Thunberg, a 15 year old student,
holding a vigil every Friday at the Swedish parliament, in the last six months
tens of thousands of school students from Australia to Nairobi to Belgium,
Holland and Germany have gone on strike calling for urgent action to avert
climate change. This growing global movement deserves the full support of
teaching unions. Here’s a video for the first UK strike this Friday - 15th
February. Just scroll down to the pinned post below the event info and
pass it on as widely as you can. https://www.facebook.com/Strike4Youth/videos/353417158581705/
A representative of the NAHT (heads union) said:
“Society
takes leaps forward when people are prepared to take action. Schools encourage
students to develop a wider understanding of the world about them. A day of
action like this could be an important and valuable life experience.”
There will be a further global day of
action and school students strike on March 15th. So, while this will
start with the most concerned and dedicated young people, it is not going away
and all of us have an interest in helping it grow.
They have also called for a day of action at the DfE
between 11am and 3pm on Feb 22nd - during half term see below for details and letter to DfE
calling on them to urgently overhaul our education system so that it can play
its part in creating a sustainable society. Also see below draft resolution for
National Education Union districts aiming to amplify student demands.
XR London Action: Climate Truth for Schools February 22nd (Half-term)
When was
the last time you heard school students discussing their lesson on climate
change? Exactly, it doesn’t happen.
So, on the 22nd February, we’re
taking this issue right to the heart of the UK school system: the Department of
Education. We will demand that those in a position of responsibility face the
truth and allow educators to teach it. Please join us. Everyone is very
welcome, especially families.
We have sent them this letter outlining
our demands: https://goo.gl/hJY2un.
(Also below)
You can
help by printing it and sending a copy yourself. If you have children in your
family, please add their handprints to the letter (in paint) before you send
it. The postal address is: Department for Education, 20 Great Smith St,
Westminster, London, SW1P 3BT. Thank you.
Why are we doing this?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) just told the world what our future looks like. Yet the science and
economics to explain this catastrophe are completely ignored by UK
curricula.
While a few independent and specialist schools do address the
reality of climate change, most state schools don’t. It might be covered
briefly in Geography and touched upon in RE lessons, but most worryingly, the
Science curriculum could mention the topic as little as four times across the
entire course of secondary education. The message is that climate change and
climate science are peripheral and undecided issues. What students are
principally taught, by the time they have finished their GCSE courses, is that
education is a process of acquiring qualifications for the purpose of some
future utility - a future that now looks increasingly damned.
We believe
young people have the right to know how their planet has been poisoned; we
believe they should be empowered to face reality.
Whether you are a
student, parent, grandparent, teacher or just someone who cares about
education, come and join us on what promises to be a fun day in which we take
our concerns to those in power. Families are very, very welcome.
- Schedule for the day to follow.
- If you can make banners/art
work/music/sing/wish to speak etc then please make yourself known (post in the
discussion). We’ll be organising some artwork sessions nearer to the date.
To the Ministers and Employees of the Department for Education
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told us last October that we
have 12 years to radically change every aspect of society if we are to avoid
disaster. Highly regarded scientists, like Peter Wadhams, have highlighted the
political restrictedness of the IPCC and the glaring omissions and
over-simplifications of its report. We must accept the likelihood that 12 years
is a vastly over-generous window of opportunity. We have killed 60% of mammals,
birds, reptiles and fish since 1970. Insect populations are collapsing, coral
reefs are bleached and dead, natural disasters are worsening, crops are
failing, forests are being felled or burning and forced migration is beginning.
If we keep
this information out of the public domain – out of schools, for example –
perhaps we might avoid some awkward conversations in the years to come. We
could say we never knew. After all, who wants to tell a child that, unless we
make unprecedented changes to how we live, we are heading for societal
collapse, famine, war and the increasing likelihood of human extinction?
Telling the truth exposes us to the responsibility of facing it ourselves. Which is exactly why we must tell our
children: not
simply to inform them (many are far better informed than older generations) but
also so that we can be held to account for our own actions. We must follow the
example of the brave young people who will, on coming Fridays, be striking from
school to demand truth and action.
When we
have had the evidence for decades, why does it amount to little more than a
footnote in our national curriculum – a vague and marginal concern? Geography
lessons cover the basic theory but in the national curriculum for Science the
evidence for anthropogenic climate change is described as ‘uncertain’. The
issue could be mentioned in as few as four Science lessons in the entire course
of secondary education. In academies there may be no mention at all. If not in
schools, where should the public learn about where our way of life is taking
us? Power knows the value of ignorance. Our Government is increasing subsidies
for fossil fuels while presiding over an educational system that effectively
denies the consequences of such a policy.
Imagine if
we had the courage to make our schools places where students learned how to
repair the damage we have caused. If we have the courage to act now they could
be the ones to revive our dying soil, regenerate biodiversity and rebuild the
ecosystems that sustain us.But we must act now. We must teach
students more than just how to pass tests. We must give them the opportunity to
discover what is wonderful and life-giving. And we must urgently equip them
with the skills, insight and courage to face what is coming. To do otherwise is
an act of criminal negligence.
The
evidence tells us that any imagined future for which we are currently preparing
our young people is a dream that will never be realised. The lives of every one
of our children will be defined by the effects of climate and ecological
breakdown. We therefore make the following demands:
1. The ecological and climate crisis is
immediately announced as an educational priority.
2. Well-founded and evidence-based
training is provided for teachers to convey this message, including the
scientific and economic causes of the crisis, what governments and society need
to do about it and also on how to support young people when taking on this
information. This should be implemented by no later than September 2019.
3. An immediate overhaul of the current
curriculum, in the light of scientific evidence and without political
interference, aimed at preparing children for the realities of their future on
this planet.
Please –
because we love our children so much – let’s teach them the truth. We await
your response with due impatience and loving rage: schoolsforclimatetruth@gmail.com
NEU Resolutions
(Insert
name of District here) NEU notes:
1. The IPCC report of 2018 which identified the
urgent need to limit global warming below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial
levels and the urgency of taking accelerated action within the next 12 years.
2. The IPCC have identified that currently global
emissions put us on track for potentially catastrophic increases of up to 4-5
degrees warming by the ended of the century.
3. The action taken by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish
school student who initiated school student strikes and protest outside the
Swedish Parliament to demand urgent action on climate change -
#FridaysforFuture.
4. Other students strikes including in Australian
on Friday 30th Nov which saw 10,000s of school students strike to
demand urgent action on climate change; which are now spreading globally.
5. That young people in schools and colleges will
be in their old age by the end of this century so have a huge stake in what
happens to our climate and the actions or otherwise that are taken to urgently
reduce emissions to limit warming to 1.5 degrees
6. The call for a UK school students climate
strike on Friday Feb 15th to coincide with the next
#FridaysforFuture school strike called by Greta Thunberg. and the further call
for a day of global action on March 15th.
(insert
name of District) NEU resolves to;
1. Recognise the significance of the school
student strikes and support the student demands for the UK government to take
urgent action on climate change.
2. To ask Head Teachers to take a sympathetic
attitude to school student strikes to allow those who want to
participate in the protests to attend and to organise assemblies, tutor time,
themed learning weeks and other extra-curricular initiatives to discuss the
issue of climate change and solutions to it in the weeks leading up to such
strikes.
3. To call for government to make changes to the
school curriculum to ensure that climate change is taught to ensure a deeper
understanding of the problem and the solutions to it; thereby
meeting their obligations under Article 12 of the Paris Agreement and for the
national union to take this matter up in our discussions with the Shadow
Education team.
4) To
send this resolution to our national executive members with the request that it
is discussed at the JEC.
