Disappointed in Adults

In this contribution to NORRAG’s “Provocations for education from youth climate activism” blog series, Claudia Ruitenberg reflects on youth climate activists’ disappointment in institutional failures and calls on educators to reconsider how climate education—both offered and withheld—may repeatedly disappoint youth. 

In February 2020, just before the pandemic made large in-person gatherings impossible, I had the privilege of moderating a panel of six youth climate activists for a conference organized by a teachers’ union in British Columbia, Canada (see also Ruitenberg & Wisniewski, 2024). The all-female panel (three in grade 12, one in grade 8, and two in grade 7) included five students from across British Columbia, and one from Seattle, Washington. I spent a day listening to their stories and together we prepared the questions for the public panel. Questions included: what were they learning in school that they thought would be helpful in the fight against climate change, and what did they think they should be learning in school but weren’t? Why did they think so many environmental justice leaders are girls and women? And what would they say to teachers who are concerned that talking about climate change is too political? 

What stands out from my conversation with them was their pervasive sense of disappointment in adults. Well aware that teachers don’t write the curriculum, the panelists gave specific examples of their teachers and schools choosing not to include discussions of the climate crisis when the curriculum left them a clear opportunity to do so. They held their teachers responsible for their choices and were disappointed in them. The youth also talked about looking for help in imagining alternatives for a livable future, and how their teachers and schools are coming up short. The activists told the teachers in the auditorium that they would rather just be students and not spend their time on climate activism, but they felt adults’ failure to do better left them no choice. 

Disappointment may seem like a lukewarm term compared with the anger, even outrage, expressed in some forms of climate activism. However, the disappointment the youth expressed was not in individual teachers, but in adults and institutions systematically failing to meet obligations to youth that should have been fundamental. Bill Lawson (2015) calls this social disappointment, a response to “the failure of the government to satisfy the political expectations … of a group of citizens” and, in particular, the political expectation that “the government … do its duty to protect the social and political rights” (p. 35) of this group. In introducing this term, Lawson was referring to the social disappointment of Black Americans, which stems from the fact that the US government failed to bestow the full “political rights and social recognition” (p. 35) that were reasonably expected to follow the abolition of slavery. 

In the case of the youth climate activists with whom I spoke in 2020, the disappointment was directed at teachers and adults more generally, but other youth climate activists have certainly expressed their disappointment in the government. This is evident in the lawsuits that youth within and outside of Canada have brought against various governments. For example, in October 2019, sixteen Canadian youth filed a lawsuit against the Canadian federal government (La Rose v. Her Majesty the Queen) for failing to protect their current and future “rights to life, liberty and security of the person” and “their right to equality … since youth are disproportionately affected by the effects of climate change”; both of these rights are named in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Our Children’s Trust, 2026). The case is now scheduled to come to trial in October 2026. 

The fact that the youth climate activists with whom I spoke were disappointed in adults left me oddly hopeful, not only because the youth gathered on the panel were clearly willing and able to hold adults to account, but also because their disappointment showed that they had expectations of adults. No expectations, no disappointment. These young people clearly wanted things from the adults in their lives and one of these things was good education about things that matter. 

While there is a persistent perception that many youth are disengaged from larger political issues, including that of the climate crisis, there is also ample evidence that youth are very engaged but that engagement looks different from what it may have been in the past (see, for example, Heggart, 2020, and the special issue of Educational Review on youth activism, climate change and education). The youth on the panel told me that, if they sometimes looked disengaged in class, it was because they were thinking about how to contact a local politician, how to apply for a permit to organize a public protest, and how to build relationships in their movement. They emphasized that they were figuring these things out on their own because they didn’t learn them in school. In other words, it was youth’s deep engagement with the political issue of the climate crisis that led them to sometimes disengage from what was being taught in class, if they found that class material disappointingly unrelated to the climate crisis at the forefront of their minds.   

In a rare philosophical discussion of disappointment in teacher-student relations, Bas Levering (2000) defines disappointment as “the unpleasant feeling that occurs when desired expectations of sufficient importance do not come true” (p. 66). Levering acknowledges that it is not only teachers who express disappointment in students, for example when students do not perform as well in an assignment as teachers had expected them to, but that students may also be disappointed in teachers, for example if students receive a lower grade than they had expected. However, Levering does not address the kind of curricular disappointment expressed by the youth climate activists. These students’ expectations of their teachers were based on a careful reflection on what they should be taught in the current circumstances. The students perceived both their expectations and the subsequent disappointment when their teachers failed to meet these expectations, as entirely reasonable. 

Levering (2000) adds the important observation that “serious disappointment may result in ‘disillusionment’” and that such disillusionment results not from a single experience of disappointment when a desired expectation does not come true but from a repeated and persistent experience of disappointment. “A disillusionment shows that the world is quite different from what had been thought or believed” (p. 67). 

For youth not to become disengaged from education, it is crucial that they do not become disillusioned with it and, thus, that educators think carefully about how we may be disappointing youth repeatedly with the climate education we offer and fail to offer. How may we be less disappointing and live up to the expectations youth reasonably have of us: that we educate ourselves, that we talk about the climate crisis and are honest with youth about the state of the world, and that we make an effort to work with youth to imagine alternatives for a livable future? 

The Author

Claudia Ruitenberg is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada