Adults should be listening to young people’s concerns about the future - David Alcock

“The city is full of skyscraper buildings and police officers with helmets on and riot gear…The streets are packed with people…It has become like the Bronx, survival of the fittest.” (Anthony)

If you had asked me at the age of sixteen, I may well have given similar views to these three respondents.

Although rather extreme, their responses were representative of around eighty per cent of nearly 650 Australian upper secondary school students, from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, surveyed by Francis Hutchinson.

Asking students what they think the world will be like in the future is a common activity for those of us who are involved in education for sustainable development and these apocalyptic scenarios are not uncommon.

The twist is that these quotations are from 1992, when not only were the respondents sixteen years old, but so was I.

I unearthed them during research into visions of the future held by young people. And I am conflicted about what these now historic testimonies tell us.

Do they tell us that most teenagers will always be biased towards worst case scenarios? Perhaps. After all, many of the worries of those teenagers have not come to pass to the extent that they feared.

More violent? But deaths from conflict and terrorism have stayed steady since the early 1990s at around 1 per 100,000 deaths.

More corrupt governments? But the number of democracies around the world – granted, they are not always a hallmark of anti-corruption - has held steady at around 40 per cent.

Survival of the fittest? But global life expectancy has risen from 64 in 1992 to 71 today.

No greenery left? The history of deforestation is a tragic one, but temperate regions have had a net gain in forest since 1990, and whilst tropical deforestation is still occurring at a deplorable rate, this rate is slowing, and 31 per cent of the world’s surface is forested, compared to 32 per cent in 1992.

And yet the more sensitive part of my character empathises with those young people, and, by extension, with the young people of today.

They are willing to question the world more deeply than many adults, particularly those of us who are fortunate enough to be well insulated from economic and environmental challenges.

There is a greater deal at stake for teenagers, because they have many more decades ahead of them to live, and perhaps even to thrive, in this world.

And some might say that if we don’t worry about the future, then we won’t act to ensure that we thrive in it.

How we react to this piece of historic research is to a large extent academic.

But current research on the concerns of young people deserves more of our attention.

Surveys show that eco-anxiety is on the rise: a report published in 2021 by Caroline Hickman and colleagues reported that over 50 per cent of young people surveyed felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless and guilty about the future.

Again, part of me wants to reassure them, to point to hopeful trends - to development indicators which show that poverty and hunger have decreased, that discrimination of all kinds has declined, and that we are beginning to turn a corner in terms of our attitudes towards the environment.

This is the same part of me that wants to say that every generation has its worries and that ‘Generation Z’ is no different.

But then a more empathetic, caring, part of me wants to listen more carefully to their concerns, to fully admit to the harms that mine and other recent generations have wrought on the world, and to join them in a movement which really does challenge the status quo.

The concerns that young people have about the future of our planet are real and they are increasingly voicing those concerns.

Perhaps Rebecca Solnit strikes the right tone on this front – she writes that “We have a seldom-told, seldom-remembered history of victories and transformations that can give us confidence that yes, we can change the world because we have, many times before.”

Young people will always be uncertain about the future.

But this is all the more reason why adults should be open to having open and honest conversations about it.

After all, our children will be spending longer on this planet than we will.

David Alcock is a geography teacher at Bradford Grammar School and founder of Hopeful Education.