By Zamyia Tarrant, Resident Teacher

In today’s global platform, there is a lot to be discussed. Such as, the political atmosphere, climate change, social justice issues, poverty, health and wellness, etc. With all of these conversations, there is one area of the population that seems to be intentionally left out, the youth.

Throughout history there have been momentous change within a society as in the Civil Rights movement, Labor movement, Women’s movement and so on. All of these movements and more entailed people who shared a common idea of righting the injustices in their world. However, when publicizing the efforts made, the media focused on the adults taking action and creating a new change. That is just one side of the coin, the other side is the youth, there were many instances that the youth took up action when it was needed.

For example, the Labor movement children were working in factories with the environment being horrendous for the mental and physical health. They were working seven, twelve hour days with no breaks throughout the day and not attending school. These kids had enough and decided to advocate for themselves and performed strikes until they succeeded with new child labor laws which tied into the Labor movement for all.

For the Civil Rights Movement, students from schools around the country performed strikes that even led to black student leaders getting arrested and jailed for long periods of time. There are hundreds of stories that involved children defending moral obligations and fighting injustices in their communities and beyond.

This knowledge should be taught throughout schools in the 21st century to equip students with the awareness needed to expand their way of looking at the world and to know that you do not need to be an adult to help bring forward change that is needed in the world.