If there is one political subject that remains neglected and underestimated because of how we have for centuries run our societies, economies and families, then it is children. Although the experience and process of growing up has in many ways profoundly changed through history, our understanding of children has failed to keep pace.

Nothing makes this clearer than the children’s climate strikes. These protests, involving school-age children refusing to attend class to focus the attention of political leaders on the global climate crisis, have spread from Australia to Germany, from Sweden to Belgium; the first strikes in the UK take place on Friday 15 February and in the US later this month. But instead of taking themseriously, many “adults” (usually, though not exclusively old men in leadership positions) are still dismissing them with the utterly paternalistic argument that all these protests are nice and cute, but skipping school? Why can’t the children protest in their “free time”, instead of endangering their own education and their future which we, the adults, supposedly have provided for them.

The most absurd reaction has emerged from Belgium, where an environment minister, Joke Schauvliege, has been forced to resign after claiming that the Belgian children skipping school were being directed by unnamed foreign powers.

Schauvliege suggested that the protests were a “set-up” and she falsely claimed that Belgian intelligence had knowledge that the children’s actions were “more than spontaneous actions of solidarity”.

There was a paternalistic dismissal of the school protests too from the Australian resources minister, Matt Canavan, who said in a radio interview that the action was setting the children up for failure: “Walking off school and protesting, you don’t learn anything from that.”

Meanwhile, consider an interview the German news magazine Der Spiegel did with Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish mastermind of the school strikes movement, who travelled 32 hours by train to get to Davos while the “adults” who were supposed to meet to talk about climate change there arrived in 1,500 private jet flights.

The Spiegel journalists flew (although at least not by private jet) to Sweden just to meet Greta and their most pressing question was: who is really behind the girl who’s become an inspiration for children across the world?

So, after suggesting to the child that her speeches seem a bit too good to have been written by a kid, they then asked her directly: “Who stands behind Greta”? She patiently answered that she herself is “behind Greta”, and added an important lesson to the journalists and adults: “Some people claim that my parents have brainwashed me, but it was the opposite: I brainwashed my parents. I convinced them not to fly any more and to stop eating meat”.

‘Greta Thunberg travelled 32 hours by train to get to Davos while the adults who were supposed to meet to talk about climate change there arrived in 1,500 private jet flights.’ Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

When the journalists asked her whether she found it acceptable that tens of thousands of children were skipping school, Greta, fully aware that the school strikes are the only effective but also somehow “traumatic” part for most of the adults (or world leaders) who are otherwise fine with co-opting the children’s leader as a sort of entertainment at Davos, simply answered: “You have to stop destroying our future.”

Faced with the same paternalistic complaint that children shouldn’t be skipping school, 13-year-old US pupil Alexandria Villasenor, who has started walking to the UN in her own climate strike every Friday, speaks in blunt terms: “If we’re not going to have a future, then school won’t matter any more.”

She couldn’t be more right. While in Belgium tens of thousands of children have been skipping school to join demonstrations for action against climate change, at the same time, in another corner of Europe, the children of Macedonia have been forced to skip school because of air pollution. This shows that some children are denied school because of the way “adults” manage the world.

What the children’s protests are bringing back is a sort of universalism (children in Belgium are also protesting about the future of the children in Macedonia), but a much-needed debate about the very notion of a common future. For this reason we have to understand this wave of children’s disobedience (even skipping school) as an attempt to literally take back time (the future) from a system that is founded on extraction not only of natural resources, but of time and the future itself.

There is a wonderful children’s fantasy novel published in 1973 in German with the full title Momo, or The Strange Story of the Time Thieves and the Kid Who Brought Back Stolen Time to Humans, which deserves new recognition. Not just because it actually imagined such children’s protests, but because it offers a much-needed inversion of “adults” and “children”.

It was written by Michael Ende, the author of the more famous The Neverending Story. Momo is not just a surprisingly accurate depiction of the world of acceleration and indebtedness in which we are living today, but a rallying call to resistance to young people. Now it seems, the children’s climate strikes are precisely an answer to the events that started to be unleashed in the 1970s and were best summed up by the famous Sex Pistols song from 1977 No Future.

In an interview on German television in 1993, Ende predicted that the world was headed toward either an economic or an ecological catastrophe, that we are, in fact, waging war against our children.

The first war against our youngest citizens is the destruction of the planet, which is the theft of their future; the second war is the overreaction to the current children’s protest. It reflects our western cultural tendency to simultaneously treat children like pets – sentimentalising and infantilising them while at the same time dismissing their concerns. The billionaire business leaders of Davos applauded the Swedish girl at Davos, but from the outside it looked like a sideshow, a piece of diversion, rather than anything that would really cause them to change direction.

But what if the children today were considered the true grownups, and the “adults” who are leading the world into an ecological catastrophe – as they fly into an Alpine resort in 1,500 private jets to pay lip service to climate change – were considered the spoiled and dangerous children?

If we want to have a future at all, the children of the early 21st century have to be taken seriously – and the adults should join their protests.

• Srećko Horvat is a philosopher from Croatia and one of the founders of the Democracy in Europe Movement

• This article was amended on 7 February 2019 because the date of the UK school strike was wrong. It will take place on 15 February

