It's a whole thing.
I went to several schools and kids being driven to school has always been an exception. They mostly walked or took public transport [0]. My sister went to high-school in a more rural area (read far-away suburb) and kids from the surrounding towns used to take the school bus.
Yet, school still started very early, a little past 8:00 AM. I absolutely loathed having to get up so early in the morning (7-ish) and used to be half asleep for the first few periods.
While US issues around transportation certainly don't help, there must be something else going on with the school schedules since they seem to be roughly the same in areas where transportation is not an issue.
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[0] I know there were exceptions for kids living far away, I was one of them since we moved during high-school, but I didn't change schools. However, this is absolutely not the norm where I grew up.
I grew up in a small village in rural Scotland, and there was exactly one bus a day to/from School. If I missed it, I had a 5 mile walk to get there. I got a bike at some point, but twisty rural roads were not the safest place to be riding.
Clearly you didn’t grew in Barcelona, or Paris, or London, …
Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.
I agree that transportation here has many issues and I absolutely hate it, but when I was a kid [0] I could get to school fine with the suburban train. My classmates had no issue getting there with the bus (regular, not school bus).
> Back when I had a car commute for work I could tell the day the school summer holidays begin just by how much it took me to get to work.
Sure, I can tell it from the Paris metro, too. The reason is that people tend to go away on vacation. This also explains the usual spikes in traffic jams the weekend right at the start and at the end of vacations.
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[0] I'm in my thirties, so that wasn't a long time ago
Before that, schools tend to be denser. Because I had to attend some special classes, I couldn't go to my local school and needed to go a further one. It was a 30-minute walk.
Normally, kids would go to their local schools, of which I passed one on my way. My local one was in the opposite direction, 2 minutes away from my house.
At least in Paris itself, only a third of homes have cars, and in this third, not everyone is going to bring its children to school using it.
Sure, maybe in smaller cities that’s a problem, but honestly if you’re choosing to drive round London then you’re taking a massively suboptimal method of transport.
Of course, public transport shouldn't be necessary for most city kids, which ought to have a school in walking and certainly biking[1] distance. It'd be interesting to see the distribution of distance to school in different locations and for different years. Increases in suburbanization are bound to increase the average distance to school; but rural kids even in my generation and more so in my parents and grandparents generation managed much longer commutes without a car as a matter of course.
[1] Maybe kids use the bike less since there's a perception that it's gotten more dangerous. A perception that's not totally wrong, at least in Germany: the number of bike accidents has increased from ~74k in 2000 to 87k in 2019[2], though at least the number of fatal accidents decreased in the same time.
[2] Table 1.1 https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Verkeh...
Yes, kids that already live in the city won’t obviously get taken to school by car, but most good schools in the periphery better have a way to handle the cars.
I wouldn't call 8:00 "very early". Elementary school started 7:25 for me, "Gymnasium" 7:20. Didn't really have a problem with it, same with my classmates. If you keep a decent sleeping schedule, don't play games on some device right before bed or laze about all day, it's a non-issue under normal circumstances.
The natural shift of the sleep cycle towards later hours during puberty is exactly the topic.
I would consider myself to be the textbook example: zombiesque in school until 10am, now, 25 years later, I naturally wake up at 6am.
Having spent many hours on the Parisian metro, there’s no chance I’d let my children anywhere near it. Even supervised.
The metro can be unsafe at night, but usually not at times where children commute.
High schoolers that need to be taken to school by their parents are definitely the exception.
Here in the UK there are parking restrictions around practically every school to stop parents clogging up the roads to drop off or collect their kids. I'd suggest that's evidence that a lot of children still get taken to school by car.
One has to know that every 10 minutes the train stops at the school as it has their own stop.
Busses also stop at school.
Nonetheless the amount of kids in their teens being driven to school by parents is staggering.
Once in a while someone comes in late. But, it is not that regular thing. Most of them in fact catch busses just fine.
Missed connections are usually missed deliberately, regardless of what is said to the parents later.
Because I am and I went to school by bus beginning with 12 years, and busses here are reliable (like "by minute reliable").
Most school districts I've lived in seem designed to ensure parents drive their kids to school.
As an example, my current district won't offer a bus unless you live more than 3 miles away. 3 miles is a giant distant to walk every morning. Luckily, we live about a half mile away and she bikes to school. I wouldn't let her bike 3 miles, because it would mean crossing multiple highways.
Pretty much everyone here bikes to work at that age. Even if its 20km through wind and rain. On top of that, being dropped off by mommy and daddy does not impress your fellow students!
I had 10km from home to university. I would definitely not want to do double that amount everyday. Even as I was in shape at the time, doing it on bike everyday would be severely unappealing. It would probably also meant that biking has to be the only sport I do.
If nothing else, both take huge amount of time. If you go those 40km slowly (or environment prevents it), you are looking at very long commute. If you go them fast, then you cant claim it is not a sport.
Much as we want to give kids responsibility and as much as some kids will thrive off it, others don’t yet that the maturity to look after themselves even for short periods.
And here lies the problem. You often end up setting up social systems to support the worst cases rather than the best of even average populous.
It’s one of those things you realise once you are responsible for kids of your own (and no, pets don’t count). Much as you cringe setting the same boundaries you hated growing up, you realise you realise they exist for a reason.