Why don’t our children walk to school?
June 20th, 2007 by Mr. TMOLThere’s a lesson to be learned regarding exercise and transportation here:
The British Medical Association found that every hour spent walking or biking adds more than an hour to one’s healthy lifetime.
In the Netherlands, 27 percent of all trips are made by bicycle, compared with 1 percent in the United States.
In 1974, 60 percent of children in the United States walked or biked to school, whereas in 2001, only 13 percent did.
Two-thirds of all school-aged children who live within a mile of their school still travel by car.
What’s wrong with this picture? We hear people rationalize that we drive our children to school for reasons of “safety.” But what if most children started walking to their neighborhood schools? There’s great safety in numbers. And what’s “safe” about driving children to school, thereby depriving them of several hours of healthy lifetime each week?
June 21st, 2007 at 12:37 pm
The same idea- that strength in numbers can assuage our concerns of safety- appears in the women’s safety movement Take Back the Night. The Take Back the Night movement argues that by telling women to fear going out at night alone, we promote the trend of lurking nightly predators and make their rapes and thefts all the easier. But imagine if women walked the streets alone with no fear! The strength in numbers would protect them all, grant them new freedom fully equal wtih that of men, and drive the creatures of the night into obscurity. The concept has a nice idealistic ring to it, but I think most people would refuse to risk their own lives until the goal of making nights (and children’s treks to school) safer has already occured!
June 21st, 2007 at 6:49 pm
It used to be that there was a one-room school house every so many miles, so children had a particular limited (maybe a mile or two) distance to walk. When schools started consolidating and centralizing, walking was no longer a convenience for children. While there may be neighborhood schools in metropolitan areas, many rural kids are miles and miles away from school. This led to bussing. The shift to driving culture has resulted in design for driving culture and doesn’t encourage walking.
Btw, we live close enough to our public schools that my children do walk, unless the weather is really nasty.