Buckle up on buses? The Kalamazoo Gazette asks whether Michigan should require seat belts on school buses.
A better question would be why we have such abominations as school buses in the first place? Someday people are going to look back like we now do on child labor in factories, asking what kind of brutish people those were who could make their own children waste hundreds of hours of their childhoods on those things.
I wish I had back all the time I spent on school buses during my high school days. (For most of my elementary school, I usually walked to school — a quick walk across a hay field in good weather, maybe a little longer if I had to go round by the road.) I wish we had never had to put our own kids on those things. I still remember the first day our oldest got on a bus to go to a pre-school class. It was probably more traumatic for us than for her, but those things don’t do anyone any good.
How will kids get to school without buses? Well, we sometimes put some extra CO2 in the atmosphere to drive our kids to school instead of making them take the bus. But the real solution is to break up large school districts in favor of neighborhood schools closer to homes. If we put kids on buses, the least we can do is keep the time spent there as short as possible. It will do until an enlightened age comes that does away with them altogether.