Year 12 student Joanne Tran said kids were being used as pawns by climate alarmists
Children are scared of coal because public school teachers have told them “mining is going to destroy you”. One Year 12 student said pupils were being used as pawns by climate alarmists because teachers had made them afraid of coal.
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Children are scared of coal because public school teachers have told them “mining is going to destroy you”.
Year 12 public high school student Joanne Tran said pupils were being used as pawns by climate alarmists because teachers had made them afraid of coal.
“I remember being in class (and told) ‘mining is bad’, ‘mining is going to be the end of us’ and ‘mining is going to destroy you’,” she said.
“We need to fix our education system, especially our curriculum right now. I think fundamentally there is something wrong with our education and how we teach what we teach kids in school.”
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Ms Tran, 17, estimated 70 per cent of students at her public high school were expected to skip class today to attend a climate rally.
In an opinion piece in today’s paper, she said that students’ time was better spent in class learning the facts rather than parroting the views of activists.
“At the end of the day in Australia, more than 50 per cent of our exports rely on commodities,” she said. “In fact (coal) is actually incredibly important to the Australian economy and economies around the world.”
Today’s strike comes amid plummeting results in writing, with one in five Year 9 students failing standard testing including NAPLAN last year.
Australian research found that even one day absence can negatively affect NAPLAN results years later.
“Every day counts and days that you’re missing in Year 3 and Year 5, we can detect that all the way through to Year 9,” the University of Western Australia researchers found, also revealing Australian high schoolers miss more days of school than almost any other developed country.
At last year’s School Strike 4 Climate, several protesters had misspelt basic words such as government, environment and jealous.
When The Daily Telegraph asked Ms Tran to spell the same words on Thursday, she passed with flying colours.
She said her classmates needed to engage in facts rather than naively accept assertions the country could transition from coal-fired power to renewables immediately.
“They don’t consider the economy, rising energy prices, how reliable renewable energy is and whether we’re at that point where we can actually make that drastic change to renewable energy,” she said.
Education Minister Dan Tehan said it was “incredibly disappointing” students would be missing valuable school time.
“The protest is all about environmental activists, sadly using our schoolchildren to advance their means,” he said.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said kids were “allowed to have an opinion” but in an “ideal world” they would protest outside school hours.
The NSW Department of Education said schools were not the place for staff to promote partisan political views: “A staff member found to have promoted partisan political views to students has breached the department’s Code of Conduct and will be subject to disciplinary proceedings.”
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ECO-ACTIVIST ORGANISERS CROWD-FUND $19K
The eco-activist organisers of today’s school strikes have pocketed at least $19,000 in crowd-funding donations in the past two days after appealing to the public for money on behalf of students.
A Go Fund Me page has been set up with photographs of school children saying the money is needed to buy paints and banners for “us to decorate”, as well as send bulk text messages to “spread the word”.
But despite a claim the school strike “is 100 per cent student-led”, all the donations made are being funnelled directly into the taxpayer funded environment charity the Australian Youth Climate Council.
The organisation, run by an all-adult board and 68 adult staff, also takes a 3 per cent cut “to cover the administration costs of managing the funds”.
In the past 23 hours the charity has been given $19,093 by 339 people, including money from individual donors like Deborah Van Urk, who gave $100 “for my granddaughter and my students, for their future”. The AYCC is asking for a $50,000.
AYCC, which is organising the strike through social media pages it administers and has provided logistics for the rallies, says the money is needed because “we are a decentralised grassroots network”.
Last financial year it was given $2.8 million in donations and government grants, which it uses to campaign against coal and run “social justice bootcamps” to train high school students to become climate activists.
The AYCC says 50 per cent of the public donations will be evenly split between local strike group activities, of which there are 60 across Australia and 50 per cent toexisting planned activities (including #ClimateElection Town Halls and candidates forums) in political hot-spots
Originally published as Year 12 student Joanne Tran said kids were being used as pawns by climate alarmists
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