Dani Lebo: Skipping school on Friday is the best thing our kids can do for the environment

A carnival float depicts the school strikes 'Friday for Future' with Greta Thunberg during the traditional carnival parade in Duesseldorf, Germany. Photo/AP

The best lesson our kids will learn on Friday, March 15, will not be taught in any school.

On that date, all around the world, hundreds of thousands of students will walk out of schools as part of the School Strike 4 Climate – demanding government action on climate change.

The movement was started by 16-year-old Swedish school girl, Greta Thurnberg, who sat alone on the steps of parliament for three weeks, skipping class to hand out fliers demanding her government do more for climate justice.

Now, the movement has caught on. Students all over the world are now taking part in Fridays for Future – ditching school to demonstrate at town halls every Friday. And on March 15 there are over 500 actions planned worldwide.

Right here in Whanganui, students have organised their own school walk out, with a protest planned for the punch bowl at Rotokawau-Virginia Lake.

How dare these impetuous children skip school? How many of them even know what climate change is, anyway? They'll probably get into all sorts of trouble on Friday. Lock your windows. Shut your doors. The kids will be running riot.

As they should be.

Maybe a little riot making is exactly what we need. A little rule-breaking. A little bucking-the-system.

Because, following the rules of the system is pretty much what got us here in the first place. So many of us were told to be a good student, study hard, get a degree.

But the results are in – and all of those straight As on all of those report cards don't mean anything for the environment.

In fact, the people with the biggest ecological footprints are also the most highly educated.

Fifty per cent of the world's resources are used by the 10 per cent richest people – people who follow the rules, went to school, have degrees.

As David Orr says, "The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth" (Earth in Mind, p. 5).

But why is this?

Our educational system was designed to create a labour force for the industrial revolution – to bolster the capacity of nations to produce things. And it worked.

For about two centuries now we have, as a species, increased our collective knowledge so much, that we are now able to produce smartphones and heart monitors and even plastic containers shaped like a banana that hold actual bananas.

Dang, that's an effective education system.

We have also in the past two centuries seen the largest loss of biodiversity on the planet in human history. So, maybe that system isn't so effective after all.

There is a quote that is often mis-attributed to Albert Einstein that says "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them". More of the same kind of education won't save the planet.

We need to shift our educational systems, practices, and even values to educate children in a way that will encourage them to solve our environmental problems, not compound them.

This shift means emphasising independence, resilience, and problem solving over rule-following. We need to teach our children that instead of looking to us to solve their problems (problems that we created), they will need to be capable of solving them themselves.

Parents, principals, and even politicians have been weighing in about whether students should be striking on Friday. But, as with all great protests, the students aren't asking for our permission.

While we sit here allowing our local papers to still give voice to climate deniers, legitimising their radicalised non-scientific beliefs; while we debate policy changes about energy and food to implement in 2050; while we continue dragging our feet because we're comfortable with our cheap economy airfares; they will be striking -whether we like it or not. What they are asking for, is for us to simply get out of the way.

As Greta Thunberg said, "We fight for our future. It doesn't help if we have to fight the adults too."

My 6-year-old wants to go to the protest on Friday. I'm hoping she will learn that it is brave and right to stand up for what you believe. I'm hoping that she will see examples of young people who are composed, organised, and powerful.

I'm hoping she will learn that she too can be an agent of change. These are lessons that she will need as she navigates a world very different from the one I grew up in. These are lessons that I can't teach her and they are lessons she can't get at school.

Information on the Whanganui strike can be found on Facebook: Whanganui School Strike 4 Climate.

Information about the movement and the students' demands can be found here: www.schoolstrike4climatenz.com