Francesca Rudkin: Leave the kids alone

I rolled my eyes on Friday as New Zealand youth became the latest punching bag of politicians getting some air time.

School was ditched for another Climate Strike around the country, that not only called for action on climate change, but also featured calls for Māori rights and a free Palestine.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour said it was 'unacceptable' for students to protest during school hours and they should be marked absent by schools.

He’s right on both accounts. Ideally our children would be in school, and they will be marked as absent - unjustified absent even. Not that that means much.

But here’s why I don’t like using youth as political point scoring:

We want our youth to be curious, and engaged with the world. We want them to have their own opinions, a vision for the future, and hope. But when they express this we seem to get miffed. We talk about the need for civics to be taught in school - but when young people taking an interest in Government policy and global events we demean them.

Just because they have views that may be different to other generations doesn’t make them any less valid. Listening to other people’s points of view and understanding their perspective is as important in a civil society as knowing how to voice your own views. We are not teaching youth this by gaslighting them.

Sure, there are teenagers who aren’t really engaged with the issues who likely took the day off school to attend, but that’s only a problem if they aren’t attending school regularly - and that’s where our focus should be.

If your kid does attend school most of the time and just went along to check it out - clock it up as a valuable life experience. They’re not ram-raiding a dairy for vapes in a stolen car. Or swanning around on an international family holiday in term time. There are lots of reasons why teenagers aren’t in school. Is this reason so bad?

And remember, as annoying as the disruption is for teachers when teenagers don’t turn up to school, it’s actually not hard to catch up on a day’s work. As one of my children (who didn’t attend the protest said), the Minister for Education keeps telling us the curriculum is poked. That’s not much of an incentive to go to school.

Many claim a student-led climate protest is a waste of time, and won’t achieve anything. The same could be said about various other protests we’ve seen over the last 4 years - but what I would say to politicians who dismiss these protesters as just kids who should be at school, do so at their own peril. Many of those expressing their concerns at this Government’s climate policies, or lack of them, will be voting in a couple of years, and becoming young leaders in their own right.

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