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Social justice
The Most Subversive Thing School Ever Taught Me
They didn’t mean to radicalize a 6-year-old
The paragraph was on the right-hand side of the page, about three-quarters of the way down. I’ll never forget it.
You’ve probably run into the same information multiple times, but this was the first time for me. It was a 1970-ish version of this quote from the Center for Sustainable Systems:
I learned that Americans produce more garbage, use more energy and — though it would be decades before I’d learn the term, have out-sized “carbon footprints.”
A big sense of injustice cropped up in my little first-grade heart. How could we keep doing this? Wasn’t anybody else concerned that we were taking up more than our fair share? Apparently the rest of the class read on, unperturbed. (The majority of them would eventually grow up to be Trumpers.)
But I would never be the same. From that day on, I was concerned about my place on the Earth and how my actions would affect other people and the planet. I grew up concerned about environmentalism, climate change, recycling — all of it.
