Twenty years ago, the highly-acclaimed documentary called ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ centred around talks that the US Vice President (or, as he introduced himself, “I used to be the next President”) Al Gore delivered on the severe threat of global warming to this world, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. The film’s trailer laid it on thick: “If you love your planet; if you love your children, you have to see this film” (of course we do!) and asked the question “Did the planet betray us or did we betray the planet?” An inconvenient and uncomfortable question, for sure.

The inconvenience was that as human activities cause global warming, we are forced into a difficult personal choice between changing our lifestyle or face severe ecological disaster. Global warming threatens jobs, brings the risk of financial loss, impacts our daily life, requires a change of behaviour; it affects us individually, politically, globally. So, yes, truth can indeed be inconvenient at times. He declared that it was not a political issue but more a moral issue and certainly morals can get in the way of our personal enjoyment at times. However, rather than global warming being the threat to our world, perhaps the biggest threat is the moral waning that is on the increase, a cooling attitude towards morals and standards.

It may be less of an inconvenient truth but more of an uncomfortable trait or question to ask ourselves: where are we failing this generation of children? Are we as parents and educators willing to be uncomfortable in squaring up to the fact of what our children do and are like. Generations come and go, sure, and change. This generation of young people is different, and we may be inclined to treat them as people did when we were young. The old school attitude pines for “the good old days”, lamenting the idea of “When I was at school” and “it was not like that when I was at school”. Such comments do not carry any weight today, though.

To a degree there is merit and validity in the thinking, as society has tended to pander to the children’s desires and situations. We have often molly-coddled them; or as some would say, children today are soft. They would say that everyone must get a prize, not just the winner (“everyone must win or else we will ruin their self-confidence”). We do not tell them off when they have done wrong and certainly never in public, lest we embarrass them (even when they deserve a telling off). We excuse their behaviour on all sorts of counts, rarely to do with truth.

The uncomfortable truth is that children today are not like what we were and are not like what we want. In that regard we need to get out of our comfort zone and make our children uncomfortable. No-one likes to be uncomfortable, and we do not wish to make others uncomfortable, but the truth is that when things are uncomfortable, we do respond to make things better, hopefully before it is too late. The uncomfortable trait is the moral waning that is prevalent in society.

Equally uncomfortable for us as educators (teachers and parents) is being asked if the education that we are offering now is really helping our children to learn, grow and contribute. Are we honest, humble, brave enough to try to answer that question? Are we presenting the importance of values, morals, principles and ethics? Or are we falling for heated fun, expensive ease, personal popularity?

The question that Al Gore and his followers raised is “what sort of world are we leaving our grandchildren?” Of equal importance, and perhaps of equal consequence too, though more uncomfortable, is the reversal of that question: for our part, what sort of grandchildren are we leaving this world? That may be a much harder question to answer, if we do not address it now. But the sort of grandchildren that we raise may well need to make the world (or what is left of it) extremely uncomfortable.

We noted at the start that the film asked us if we loved our children (implying blatantly and brutally that if we did not see the film, we did not love them). We can equally and fairly say that if we love our children, we need to make them uncomfortable. If we do not, then we are betraying them, not the planet; if we do not, then they perhaps will become the “used to be the next” whatever. Global warming or moral waning – there is the issue put simply. How comfortable are we with that?