My name is Jude Daniel Smith, and I’m a 15-year-old climate activist from Sheffield, England. Early last year, I set up Youth Strike for Climate Sheffield with some friends – since then, I have come to volunteer with UKSCN, and, most recently, with Teach the Future. Teach the Future is the UK Student Climate Network (UKSCN) and Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK) joint campaign to repurpose the education system around the climate emergency and ecological crisis.
As students studying across the UK, it is our experience that the majority of teaching and learning throughout the entirety of our education is misaligned from the systemic changes urgently required to make our society sustainable. Our education system routinely fails to educate, prepare and equip us, and our fellow students, for the climate emergency we are inheriting.
I joined Teach the Future as, being in Y10, I have gone through the education system without once being empowered to, nor taught how to, take action regarding climate change. As any youth activist would tell you, the climate emergency is the most crucial and time-urgent issue humanity has ever faced. Consequently, you’d believe that a multitude of comprehensive steps would have already been taken to enable young people to swiftly and efficiently mitigate the catastrophe at hand – despite this, those in power have continuously failed our generation, yet still expect us to amend the mistakes of humanity’s past.
Education is one of the few pillars of contemporary society which keeps its seemingly crumbling roof stable, so why is its potential – that being the fact it so easily could be the birthplace of classes upon classes of pupils armed with the knowledge they need to help fix the world around them – so nonchalantly ignored? This sense of urgency which I wish I did not have to constantly harbour is why I have such a passion for youth activism. I joined secondary school and, within days, began to realise and rationalise the utter scale of the shortcomings of global governments on an array of different issues. I would plead with my teachers to answer my questions about the world, about what could be done, but could never get a straight reply – I realise now that that is due to a simple fact. Educational facilities are not equipped to teach about the subject of climate change, yet people expect them to be the enablers.
In a survey collated by SOS-UK (*SOS-UK 2020) around multiple schools and colleges across the country, it was found that 75% of teachers would say they do not feel knowledgeable enough to teach students about climate change, and at the same time, only 4% of students would say they know a lot about climate change. These statistics are a disturbing representation of the root cause of both the climate emergency and anxiety stemming from it. Teach the Future aims to convert anxiety into agency through direct reform to all aspects of our education system; rather than just curriculum modification, we need a complete overhaul of our education system, detailed in our asks.
In England, we have three: