When Education Is the Problem: Lessons from Youth Climate Activism

In this blogpost, which is part of NORRAG’s blog series “Provocations for education from youth climate activism,” Iveta Silova, Jeremy Rappleye and Hikaru Komatsu argue that the crisis we face is educational and can only be addressed by unsettling the cultural foundations of schooling as we know it.

Every crisis has its curriculum. The climate crisis delivers the core lesson of modern schooling: obedience to progress, growth, and the cult of individualism.

For decades, the industrialized world—home to the most celebrated education systems and the highest test scores—has insisted that more knowledge, innovation, and agency would save it. It hasn’t. The very societies that most idolize schooling, that measure their worth through knowledge and innovation, are also among the most ecologically destructive. This is not failure by accident but by design: modern schooling has long taught us to equate learning with mastery, improvement, and endless growth.

Across the planet, young people are the first ones to refuse this collective delusion. From global school strikes and youth-led court cases across continents to Indigenous land defenders and students building climate assemblies worldwide, they are rejecting an education that equates learning with obedience and progress with extraction. In some societies, this refusal takes quieter forms — visible not in the streets but in everyday life, as many young people in East Asia turn away from consumption itself, embracing minimalist aesthetics that reject excess and quietly reduce environmental harm.  These movements are not extensions of schooling; they are acts of refusal. When youth skip school to strike, replant forests, reclaim public spaces, or choose to live with less, they are performing a deeper pedagogy—one that exposes the limits of a civilization educated to extract, consume, and dominate rather than to coexist.

The response, however, has been to double down on schooling. Faced with planetary breakdown, schools and universities now rush to add “sustainability” modules, green campuses, and climate literacy curricula. International organizations call for “transformative education” and “change agents for sustainable development.” Yet, these well-meaning efforts rarely escape the same cultural logic that produced the crisis.

In Re-thinking Pedagogies for Climate Change Activism, we argue that even the most progressive forms of modern schooling—learner-centered, agency-driven, or “transformative”—remain bound to the ideal of the autonomous individual mastering the world. Beneath their emancipatory language lies a deeper inheritance: the Enlightenment faith in separation. Education divides mind from body, human from nature, learner from community. Through exams, rankings, and credentials, it trains students to compete rather than to care. It celebrates empowerment without interdependence, action without reflection, and change without transformation. Decades ago, Chet Bowers (1993) warned that “if the thinking that guides education reform does not take account of how the cultural beliefs and practices passed on through schooling relate to the deepening ecological crisis, then these efforts may actually strengthen the cultural orientation that is undermining the sustaining capacities of natural systems upon which all life depends” (p. 4). In other words, if we attempt to address the climate crisis by doubling down on schooling – by using the same cultural logics that led us here – we risk only accelerating the crisis. The ‘medicine’, in this case, would make us even sicker.

Youth activism, in contrast, signals another way of learning—one that unsettles the cultural foundations of schooling as we know it. What appears as protest is, more deeply, a reorientation of learning—not mastery over the world, but attunement within it. In street marches and mutual aid networks, in community gardens and creative acts of resistance, young people begin to re-situate education within the living world that modern schooling long sought to master. Their learning unfolds not through control but through relation—through shared vulnerability, reciprocity, and repair. In this sense, youth activism gestures toward what might be called a pedagogy of interdependence, one that resonates with many non-Western traditions in which the self is formed through relationship rather than defined by separation. In these practices, we might glimpse the kind of cultural shift that modern education has been unable to imagine for itself.

This pedagogy is not new. Many Indigenous, relational, and non-Western traditions have long understood learning as participation in a web of life rather than accumulation of mastery. What youth climate movements are doing is bringing these understandings back into the global imagination, confronting the modern world with the knowledge it has suppressed. Their collective practices of resistance and refusal remind us that education cannot be sustainable if it continues to sustain the very worldview—of extraction, competition, and progress—that makes sustainability impossible.

To take youth seriously is to read their activism not as a call for better schooling but as an invitation to reimagine modern education itself. They remind us that no amount of progress can compensate for broken relationships, and no curriculum can prepare us for a future we refuse to change. Their refusal—to comply, to normalize, to continue—may be the most important lesson of all.

For those of us inside education systems, this means recognizing that the crisis we face is not external to schooling but constitutive of it. The climate crisis is not just a scientific or political failure—it is educational. As long as education continues to worship progress and growth while ignoring the cultural violence beneath them, it will remain complicit in the very destruction it seeks to reverse.

Because if every crisis has its curriculum, this one might finally teach us that the only way to survive is to unlearn the education that made the crisis possible.

References

Bowers, C. A. (1993). Education, Cultural Myths, and the Ecological Crisis: Toward Deep Changes. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Rappleye, J., Komatsu, H., & Silova, I. (2024). Re-thinking pedagogies for climate change activism: Cognitive, behaviorist, technological, or cultural? In S. Choo, R. Khan, & S. Sengupta (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Climate and Sustainability Education (pp. 127–140). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8606-4_127

The Authors

Iveta Silova is Associate Dean and Professor, Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Arizona State University.

Jeremy Rappleye is Professor at the University of Hong Kong, as well as current Director of the Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC).

Hikaru Komatsu is Principal Researcher at On-the-Slope, a social venture based in Kyoto, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at National Taiwan University.