“The purpose of activism is to educate”: Young people's climate activism as and for education in the youth strike movement in England

By skipping school for their cause, young climate strikers repeatedly demonstrated their priorities in 2019 and 2020. They regularly chose to sacrifice a day of their formal education in favour of collective action. This study asks what we can learn from the reflections of former youth strikers. Taking the youth strike movement as one site of young people's climate activism, this paper suggests that youth climate activism exists both as and for education. This work draws on Freirean notions to frame learning through youth-led movements as a form of critical pedagogy. The study involves local strikers from the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement in Bristol, UK, with data collected in 2020 and again in 2023 from the same three participants. The experiences and perspectives of the young people are centred through a narrative approach to collecting and representing data. The analysis takes a grounded theory approach, using sensitising concepts from critical pedagogy as a theoretical framework to make sense of the data. In particular, the young people's reflections are explored in relation to their perceptions of the educational aspects of their participation in the movement and their ideas for educational reform. The findings are used both to offer a conceptualisation of activism as a site of education in its own right, as well as a call for a transformed education system. Firstly, it is argued that through their activism, young people take responsibility for educating themselves and the wider community about the issue of climate change. Secondly, the young people make overt reference to the deficiency of the formal education system in preparing them for the futures they face, and they call for improved educational offerings. Their collective ideas are shown to demonstrate a significant challenge to the educational status quo. While this research conceptualises the critical pedagogic processes at play in one specific site of youth climate activism, similar processes may be at work in other social movement contexts.