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Geoff Johnson: Don’t underestimate the capacities of the post-millennial generation

“The only reason we’ve gotten so far is that we are not afraid of losing money, we’re not afraid of getting re-elected or not re-elected, we have nothing to lose.
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Mass-shooting survivor Delaney Tarr speaks during the March for Our Lives gun-control rally in Washington, D.C., in March. Survivors such as Tarr exemplify more teen involvement in politics, Geoff Johnson writes.

“The only reason we’ve gotten so far is that we are not afraid of losing money, we’re not afraid of getting re-elected or not re-elected, we have nothing to lose.” So said high school senior and shooting survivor Delaney Tarr of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, when she spoke uncompromisingly to state lawmakers in Tallahassee, Florida, recently.

The fact that today’s teenagers such as Tarr can speak out so clearly, organize national protests and engage in worthwhile political discourse should tell us something more than we previously considered about our educational responsibilities toward them.

When it comes to social studies, social and political history, geography and the economy, much of our curriculum is focused on “what happened” and only peripherally on “why” and hardly at all on “now.”

There is no question that “what happened,” especially over the past hundred years or so, is important and is still relevant to an understanding of the world of “now” and, yes, the challenge for teachers in a classroom full of today’s information-overloaded teenagers is to keep understandings of “what’s happening now” as apolitical as possible — no view from the left, no view from the right, just an unbiased review of some of the existing research into why some systems of government fulfil their promise while others, according to political scientists, are in decline and are in danger of failing.

There is a good argument to be made that the majority of today’s senior-high students are ready to be dealing with objectively written curriculum that includes well-documented trends such as unsustainable resource consumption and allocation, economic stratification, theories about the consequences of a widening gap between the “haves” and the “have nots,” the societal effects of climate change, loss of faith in societal institutions, and the fact of and attitudes toward worldwide migration movements.

Bob Dylan well understood the youthful tendency to oversimplify complex issues when he wrote:

“As easy it was to tell black from white

It was all that easy to tell wrong from right.”

The challenge is to convince today’s teenagers, drowning as they are in 24/7 news, that because the “now” issues lack simple resolutions, a balanced discussion of the details of those issues becomes all the more necessary.

The history of Hitler’s Germany for example, is relevant to an understanding of “now” only inasmuch as it leads to some partial explanations and understandings of the how, when, where and why of the relatively sudden emergence worldwide of populist-driven quasi-autocracies.

But back to the big question: Are today’s teenagers ready for a classroom-driven, impartial analysis of what they watch, hear, see and hear at the kitchen table every day as the circumstances of “now” unfold?

Today’s teenagers, like those outspoken kids from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, are the first generation whose lives are substantially shaped and informed by mobile technology and social media.

When the time came, they were ready to challenge the old-timey politicians who wanted to pat them on the head and hope they would go away.

But they, and others like them, have not gone anywhere. Some, such as Tarr, Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg and Cameron Kasky, have become national figures, rallying points for greater and more influential teen involvement in what constitutes a safer and saner “now” and will, they hope, generate a politically wiser “soon.”

Canadian teens, according to a 2013 StatCan study of voting trends, are perhaps less inspired by the relatively soporific and (thankfully) less dramatic nature of Canadian politics and tend to be less interested than their older counterparts.

And the reality is, according to political scientists, that the interests of population groups whose voter turnout is lower will inevitably be not as well-represented or taken into account by elected governments.

Perhaps it will take more inflammatory issues such as Ontario’s politically revised sex-ed curriculum to overcome Canadian youthful apathy. Two Toronto transgender high school students have filed separate human-rights claims against the province because they say the new interim sexual-education curriculum discriminates against all LGBT students in Ontario.

Or perhaps it will be students such as Liam Christy, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Westsyde Secondary in Kamloops who is engaged in an active campaign to lower the B.C. voting age to 16. Christy says he has witnessed plenty of political savvy among peers who, in recent elections, explained party platforms to their parents.

So let’s not underestimate the capacities of today’s post-millennials, the “i-generation.” Our own generation’s future depends on them.

Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.