Duty of Care : Why students need to strike

On the 15th of February and again on the 15th of the next month, thousands of students across the UK (and the world) decided — with or without their parent’s consent — not to go to school and to attend their nearest youth climate protest. From the inside of UKSCN, the organisers of the UK strikes, it was a sight to behold, the product of many, many hard hours of work done by the passionate students in the organisation.

Though undoubtedly an event to be seen as a positive message of unity and hope, I think there is an incredibly frightening aspect of these strikes that I’ve come to realise outlines the deep flaws in our society. One of the principal pillars of that society is the education of its youth, and the duty of care that a generation has to leave the following one with a better world than the one they were given. The operative word being duty, as certainly it is a lawful duty, and one that, quite obviously, the youth of the world feel has been betrayed.

If you placed yourself in the situation of a child, learning on social media (or if they’re lucky at school where they have someone to explain it for them) that we have 11 years to drastically cut our carbon emissions and suck what we have already put up there back down; what would you do? What would you do when you realised that when Mummy or Daddy said that they would always protect you they were most likely consciously continuing to use and buy the products that are destroying that very child’s future.

We have reached a point where the duty of care has been broken, and the youth have decided to step up and take their futures into their own hands. Now all this sounds great on a placard or posted by an activist on social media, but there is a considerable gap in between taking to the streets to blame a generation for killing us all and actually changing the concept and function of our society.

This, is where I state the true message of the youth strikers: do your job. The youth don’t want to take over the world, they want adults to act like they should and fulfil the role they’re set to hold until they are replaced. We don’t want to run the Government’s country, we just want them to.