Parents, Time To Misbehave & Climate Strike With Your Kids: Our Kids Get It
- Parents, Time to Misbehave and Climate Strike With Your Kids.- Our kids get it: While schools and parents wring their hands and debate over issuing "excused absences" for missed classes, they have ignored the fact that the surge of carbon emissions last year increasingly renders a bleak future. By Jeff Biggers, Common Dreams. Sept. 18, 2019.
The recent announcement by the New York Public Schools to excuse all students taking part in the Global Climate Strike on Friday, September 20th is an admirable and welcome step by educators to address the climate crisis.
Student climate strikers, however, are not clamoring for parental and administration approval. Citing the criteria of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to drastically cut carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, they're demanding that our schools--and all adults--step up climate action.
Besides, here in the cornfields of Iowa, my teenager sons and their fellow climate strikers are familiar with the US Supreme Court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines, which upheld an Iowan student's right to protest the Vietnam War in 1965. In delivering the Court's opinion in 1969, Justice Abe Fortas reminded the nation--and the school administrators that sought to punish students for their anti-war protests--that "First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
But that's not why my kids don't need permission to walk out of school--at least from me, as their parent. The flip-side of their student responsibilities to attend school is their inalienable right to live in and inherit an inhabitable planet; that instead of asking schools and parents to grant permission to walk out of their classes, students are effectively asking adults if they have fully carried out their fiduciary duties to act in the best interests of the children in their care.
In essence: Have we as adults walked out on our children in an age of climate chaos? In the face of mass extinctions and undeniable ramifications unfolding from climate destabilization, are we denying our kids the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Here in the heartland, my kids only have to walk out of their schoolhouse gate to see firsthand devastation from historic flooding and its impact on our agricultural industry..
Our kids get it: While schools and parents wring their hands and debate over issuing "excused absences" for missed classes, they have ignored the fact that the surge of carbon emissions last year increasingly renders a bleak future.
"You say you love your children above all else," Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg admonished world leaders gathered at the annual climate summit last year, "and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes." Perhaps our kids should be granting "unexcused absences" to us as parents, teachers, administrators—and all adults?
More, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/18/parents-time-misbehave-and-climate-strike-your-kids