Those students' views don't surprise me at all - less so having recently indulged in a binge of broadsheet reading around the time of the MPs' expenses/European elections/Labour leadership/Speaker unseating debacle. Hundreds of thousands of words were written over a couple of months, not to mention endless TV and radio airtime being swallowed up, yet if we're honest most of it was just rambling speculation. Much as students should, and must, study the ins and outs of their subject, you cannot fault their insight that analysis of news only becomes useful retrospectively. Most of what happens in any given moment is only worthy of a tickertape, or Twitter, summary.
With my sustainability hat on (in-built UV visor and life-raft, only £16.99 from my website) I couldn't help but notice David Hepworth's reference to to a generation raised on 'cheap credit and irrational optimism'. The phrase succinctly summarises most people's knowledge of the challenge of sustainability - not least as it is presented to them by the media and by policymakers. Fearful that the reality is too scary or politically uncomfortable, we habitually sweeten the medicine: for example, buying a new car is seen to be OK for the planet because the car's in-use CO2 emissions are lower than your previous one - glossing over the real problem of there being millions too many car journeys taking place than will ever be sustainable, environmentally or socially. Another example: supplying households with three, colour-coded wheelie bins each might stimulate more recycling but in terms of the overall amount of waste being generated, this wheelie bin acne is almost certainly making matters worse.
Yet both greener cars and more recycling make people feel better about their impact on the planet. These are cheap credits that breed irrational optimism.
I have lost count of the meetings, conferences and policy documents I've encountered where the importance of education has been stressed and re-stressed. 'The next generation will be faced with the really big sustainability challenges, so it is education that will ultimately deliver sustainable development.' Well, quite so; but not if we raise our young on irrational optimism and the illusion of a free lunch. I suspect we are softening the blow because we fear our children will turn around and blame us for the mess they find themselves in.
Yet there is another way to look at all this. In principle, living sustainability is cheaper, because it is about consuming fewer resources that cost money, and reducing pollution that is expensive to clean up. The main reason sustainable solutions are seen as expensive now - such as replacing car and aeroplane journeys with high-speed rail - is because we're designing them to sustain and perpetuate models of consumption, mobility and financial transaction that hindsight will show to be laughably outmoded. Where education should really come in is in nurturing a new generation of inventors and tangential thinkers who can teach humanity to tread much more lightly on the earth. The beauty queen's goal of 'world peace' will be essential to that future, so war-driven technology is an example of a longstanding habit that we shall have to break.
Each day, the news could be distilled into just five words: war, crime, money, scandal, sensationalism. The students who have noticed these five words repeating day after day are probably rather enlightened. Our suited old power-brokers clearly aren't, since they stay embroiled and enraptured by it all.
Perhaps the generation that doesn't want to pay for anything will actually invent ways of doing things for free.
AW.
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