Why should we go to school?
When you won’t listen to the educated?
So read a banner at a recent Student Climate Strike.
It raises so many questions.
How did we get to a place where political leaders and the old school of patriarchal thinking object so strenuously to young people speaking up? Do they forget they were young once? Do they forget what it feels like to be ignored as youth, to be told to stay silent while the elders speak?
Eldership is not simply a result of time spent on Earth. True eldership is a discipline of listening, a commitment to stay in the conversation with the youth, to listen to their music, read what they read, be fluent in technology….and to know that the young mind is vital to any conversation, made better by partnering with wise elders, not as a patronising gesture.
Eldership is also an act of deliberate development. A commitment to be challenged. The capacity to listen to, and engage in transcontextual thinking. To recognise our fixed mindsets. To know when we are being stubborn, when we refuse to consider ideas. To transcend our own egoic nature that wants to be the boss, the one in the centre of the stage commanding attention.
Those educated people that the students speak of continue to present overwhelming evidence of human-created catastrophes.
But arrogance, denialism and self-serving agendas dismiss the educated.
So tell me, why should the children go to school? Ignored as youth, to be ignored as they qualify as scientists, while the current dinosaurs drive our small home planet off the cliff.
October 16th 2019
Photo taken October 29th, 2016
