Walking for Education

 A proposal

What are you teaching your children when they’re not actually in school? Let’s limit this question to the immediate margins of the school day – how your kids get to and from school.

If they walk, if you walk with them, if you meet them part way, these are among the possible lessons:

·        Climate change is serious. Reducing emissions matters.

·         Reducing unnecessary energy use is good stewardship of the earth’s resources.

·        Weather is both challenging and interesting and can be faced with ingenuity and pluck.

·        There is nature and architecture to be observed and appreciated close at hand.

·         Exercise - using your body - is important.

A walking pace is conducive to many things we find valuable if we can find the time and motivation to leave the car at home. The time and space between home and school can become more than an interval to be rushed past.

Walking to and from school can become the time kids might find talking about their day to come or what had happened to them that day in school to be a natural thing. Without the distraction of video games or playing or the other things kids want to get to, these moments could become a time for them to connect with their parents.

Walking and talking function together to both relax the mind and stimulate it in ways that are not stressful. And as the world moves by at a walking pace, you see the colors and textures and lines and much more that fit into to our evolutionary receptors.

Walking also means not having to concentrate on how your car and all the other cars must avoid colliding. And you get yourself out of that steel bubble for a change.

I have no illusions that walking to and from school is the easier way or always possible. But it could easily become quality time you and your children spend together, apart from the exercise. And in a better world, parents waiting together on a sheltered patio for their kids to come out of school, instead of idling alone in their cars, could perhaps come to take the place of some of the time spent in PTO meetings. Perhaps the principal could join them from time to time.

There wouldn’t need to be much additional time involved in walking instead of driving. And with not too much imagination, the time and spaces between school and home could become the kind of parental and educational time parents want anyway, taking place along the sidewalk, a better form of multi-tasking. A chauffer role could be replaced with something much better. And add in the time not spent working to pay for gas and other portions of car expenses, and one begins to see that there are ways of making walking work.

Imagine for yourself what might come to replace that line of cars that circles every school in town. And even if you find it necessary to drive, what if you parked your car several blocks away. You could make a game of it to see just where in between you and your kids would meet after school.

Take a few steps in a walking direction and see what happens.

We and our kids have something to learn by walking more - and while walking more.