“How dare you!” When an ecological crisis is impacted by an educational crisis: Temporal insights via Arendt

Abstract

In this paper we take as our starting point Greta Thunberg’s message to an audience of adults at a recent climate change summit: ‘This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!’ We take Thunberg at her word and endeavour to investigate what is wrong and how it might be wrong. Through this investigation we consider how education may be implicated in the problem to which Thunberg alludes: a problem about both climate change and intergenerational change. We draw upon Hannah Arendt’s seminal work, ‘A Crisis in Education’, to consider how an ecological crisis coincides with an educational crisis symptomatic of an inversion of the traditional adult and child relationship in which education serves to introduce the young to the world – a public world, which is distinct from the ecological world. Arendt’s position on education, we argue, reveals concerns that movements like School Strike for Climate expose young people prematurely to the risks of indoctrination that attend adult, public life, and hinders their renewal of the world. Science too may add to these risks.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• Hannah Arendt
• Greta Thunberg
• indoctrination
• science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maurizio Toscano

Maurizio Toscano is senior lecturer in the Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne. His research concerns the intersection of art, science, philosophy, education, and the environment. His research and teaching in science education and environmental education draws heavily upon questions from existentialism, aesthetics, ontology and metaphysics.

John Quay

John Quay is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne. His research and teaching interests are orientated around educational philosophy and the practices of teaching and learning, especially in the areas of outdoor and environmental education, and physical education.