These kiddie and toddler school protests have to stop – they are not old enough to make a mature decision

Sometimes things need to be said. Even if they sound mean. So here goes.

The current fashion – for that is surely what it amounts to – for children going on strike is one of those things that everyone thinks is terribly sweet and harmless, but which is in fact a deeply pernicious phenomenon that one day we might deeply regret.

Obviously frequent “industrial action” by toddlers and adolescents does no one much harm, except for their own education and their life chances. I would hate, for example, to look back on my life one day having missed out on a glittering career in, say, the law, because I just missed my grades to get into Cambridge, in turn because the vital revision lesson about Shakespeare’s use of irony was on the very day I decided to skive off and wave a placard around Trafalgar Square saying that Donald Trump is a climate-change denier with a terrible hairdo.

Less obviously, what parameters should parents and school set – tacitly – for “acceptable” kiddie protests, ones that would justify a technical breach of the law on compulsory schooling?

Climate change is deemed a suitably consensual, uncontroversial matter, for now, but how to dictate what is and is not “consensual” or “uncontroversial”? What if a bunch of radicalised 15-year-olds fancied attending a rally for Tommy Robinson one Friday afternoon? Would a headteacher be OK with that? Or if a Europhile adolescent wanted to go and hang around Nigel Farage’s place to change his mind about the European Union?

There is a reason why we don’t allow 14-years-olds to vote, get married or drive a car. It is because they are children. Love and respect them, yes, but do not kid yourself that they are capable, on the whole, of making a mature judgement. They are, in the great cliche, “the future” – but please, not yet.

Yours,

Sean O’Grady

Associate editor