Developing Disobedience: A Decolonial Childist Perspective on School Strikes for Climate Justice

What do the school strikes for climate teach (adults)? Beyond being apt responses to democratic exclusions, children’s and young people’s strikes also have educative potential (including for adults) through counterweighing formal education, as the authors previously argued. This paper continues to explore the educational import of children and young people’s climate contentions as part of a more explicit decolonial agenda. In a first step, the paper sketches the altered conditions under which children stage school strikes/occupations and highlights increasing global connections drawn also by strikes in the North. Next, departing from a reading of Socrates’s canonical defense of obedience to the law, it offers a reading of the political economy and developmentalism of neoliberal, Anthropocene schooling as part of a modern oikos that depends on children’s work in their roles as “pupils.” Finally, children’s and young people’s activism is approached as resistance to colonially shaped epistemic injustice.