I was fortunate enough to join the recent youth-led climate strike in Melbourne. I hoped to join friends there but to move through the crowd was like bush bashing deep in Tasmanian forest. Organisers speaking of 150,000 people did not seem unlikely, given that about a third of the crowd around me slipped away before the march.
The climate strike will inevitably be compared with those organised by adults. Certainly, the organisation and safety precautions were at least as thorough. The children who seemed to form about half the crowd were patient. They were receptive to the speakers, applauding what was praiseworthy while deploring the deplorable. Many held placards with sentiments variously humorous, sad and angry.
Perhaps the weakest aspects were those modelled on adult demonstrations — too many speeches, too long, and some speakers a little too captivated by the excitement of stirring a large and receptive audience. But the event was disciplined in returning to the key points of the message.
The critical response by federal government ministers and their media voices to the event invited deeper comparison. It was aggressive and sought the moral high ground, insisting that children should be at school, that teachers were conniving in breaking rules governing lesson attendance, that valuable school time required to prepare people for their place in society was being wasted and that the demonstration appealed to emotion whereas schools should be about cultivating reason. The tone was hectoring and didactic — we are adults and you are children.
Reflection on the demonstration and the criticisms made of it prompts a more radical and subversive question. Who actually were the adults here? When assessed by conventional wisdom about the path from childhood to adulthood, it might seem that supposed adults were behaving like children and children like adults.
Theories about the growth from child to adult might be summed up in three sentences. Children and adolescents are more influenced by emotion and less by reason, and therefore less likely than adults to consider the consequences of their actions than adults. Children are more self-centred than adults and less empathetic with others. The moral judgments that children make are shaped more by rules that others make than by reasoned argument.
By these criteria the behaviour of the children appeared more adult than that of the adults with whom they took issue. The climate strike came out of young people’s conviction that business and government leaders are