Becoming good ancestors: A decolonial, childist approach to global intergenerational sustainability

Abstract

AbstractThere are two key questions consistently raised by children and youth since the onset of the school strikes for climate in 2018 in the Global North: Why study for a future, which may not be there? Why spend a lot of effort to become educated, when our governments are not listening to the educated? (conf. fridaysforfuture.org, n.d). While the same questions are shared by young climate activists from the Global South, there are other interrelated economic realities that echo the disappointment, anger, disillusionment, desperation, and frustration driving those utterances in their socio‐political contexts. Comparative insights from so‐called ‘developing’ countries disclose that institutionalized schooling, commonly confused with education, manipulates the aspirations of younger generations and their wider societies. Contemporary global schooling is one of the key propellers of global economic agendas geared towards producing human capital that is ‘employable’ in the future job market. The paradox of a global education agenda geared towards generating human capital employable on a job market is that most of those jobs (if at all they will be there) continue serving the very economic system that is threatening the right to life, health, culture (especially for indigenous communities) and the best interests of future generations on this planet. As young climate activists from various countries collectively argue within the framework of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child, major economies are failing to protect the basic human rights of children and future generations. I suggest that the various interrelated crises evident through the key questions raised by young climate activists must be considered as part of a North–South continuum. In this paper, I reflect upon these interrelated crises by developing a decolonial childist approach to education—understood as an intergenerational relationship, implying an effort on part of present adults becoming good ancestors of the future, in the present. Such efforts require larger structural shifts which I consider by means of the four strategies I discuss building upon previous co‐reflections.