On Friday, an estimated 12,000 people attended the climate strike at the Manitoba Legislative Building. Among them, were hundreds, if not thousands of school aged children, accompanied by teachers and parents. It was an impressive sight. I was fortunate enough to be there with all 150 students and staff from my school. I genuinely believe that there has never been, in our history, a generation of young people as well informed on a public policy issue as these youth are on climate change. So when I hear people say, “kids shouldn't be allowed to skip school to go to strike”, it makes me stop and wonder: what is the purpose of school anyways?Aristotle once likened teachers to farmers. “Wood does not become a chair unless the carpenter acts upon it to change its form and function. A seed of corn, on the other hand, will become an ear of corn without any intervention to change its form or function”, he said. “The job of the farmer, is to increase the probability that the seed will become what it is destined to become, and that more seeds will become fine ears of corn than would be the case were it not for the attention of the farmer”.Gary Fenstermacher, a well-known educator from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, once challenged us to think about the difference between educational goals and ideals, and within that frame, to question the purpose of education itself. Ideals are like North Stars, Fenstermacher wrote. “They are orienting devices; they offer us a sense of direction. They guide our journey to a destination. But they are not the destination”. The Northfield on the other hand, is the goal. “It is the place we are trying to reach”. The value of the North Star is not as a place to get to, but as a guide to getting to places. Ideals serve that purpose; they orient us and provide direction to our efforts, but they are not the same as the places where we are going. They are not our goals, our objectives, or our standards.”We don't stop to ponder this question often enough: what is our North Star? If the purpose of school, to a large extent, is to provide students with the tools and knowledge they need to be engaged, caring, critical thinkers, active in the day to day affairs of their community, then we must not view the experiences held outside of the classroom as any less valuable than those held within it. To Fenstermacher's point, we should be focused on values.Climate change is a real crisis facing our planet, and young people are committed to learning more about how the planet is impacted, and the varying proposals being put forth by policy makers on how to deal with it. Our job as educators, and more broadly, as a community, is to aid in facilitating learning experiences that help students to cultivate and draw upon critical thinking skills that allow them to formulate opinions on issues of great significance. I'm proud of the many different questions and observations undertaken by students this past week at the strike.What these kids did on Friday was school.  They asked tough questions, they had considered, thoughtful dialogue, and they exercised their democratic right to protest peacefully. What more could we as a society want from them? To “skip” school would be to avoid going to class intentionally, with the purpose of dodging some form of learning. Making a conscious decision to leave school for an afternoon to join a global effort to try and bring attention to a public policy issue of great worth, is the pursuit of education at its finest.We need to reconsider the way we talk and think about “school”, and further to this, what really constitutes an education. We must remain thoughtful as we seek to uncover our North Star.Ben Carr is Principal of the Maples Met School