Let Them Walk
Every weekday morning, a queue of stationary cars idles outside my daughter's primary school. Almost all of them contain one adult and one child. Almost all of them have travelled less than a mile.
I understand how this happened. No parent wakes up hoping to sit in a traffic jam two streets from home. Each family made a reasonable decision — the mornings are tight, the roads look dangerous, the weather is British — and the sum of all those reasonable decisions is a road so congested that walking to school now genuinely is more dangerous than it was thirty years ago. We have created the hazard we are protecting our children from.
The case for walking is usually made on health grounds, and the health argument is real. But it is not, I think, the strongest one.
A child who walks to school arrives having already had a conversation, or twenty minutes of silence, or an argument with a friend. They have crossed roads and judged traffic and decided when to run. They have noticed that the horse chestnut on the corner has come out, or that the house with the blue door is being sold. None of this is on any curriculum. All of it is the slow accumulation of knowing where you live and being trusted in it.
A child driven to school has had none of those things, and — this is the part that ought to worry us — has been told something by the arrangement itself: that the half-mile between home and school is a place adults consider too dangerous for them.
I am not arguing that nobody should drive. Some journeys are long, some children cannot walk them, and some mornings defeat everybody. I am arguing that the default has quietly reversed within one generation, and that a default is not a decision. It is worth asking, once, whether yours is still the right one.
The horse chestnut is out, incidentally. It has been for a fortnight.
Read it once through before you start. You can look back at it as often as you like — it stays on the page while you answer.