The summer before her son entered the first grade, Anna Clauss, 43, received a letter from the Munich town hall in Bavaria encouraging her to get in touch with other parents in her neighborhood. They were asked to organize their children's school journey together. Along with six families, this journalist from the weekly Der Spiegel set up a walking bus. "We created a group of 10: eight children and two parents to escort the line," she explained. The group was supervised by a police officer tasked with teaching the pupils the rules of the road. After four months, the first-graders had to be able to make the trip without any adult.
Letting your child go to school alone is a tradition in Germany. So much so that parents who bring their children by car are known as "Eltern Taxi" ("parent cabs"). "And that's not a compliment," said Clauss. "It means you're an overprotective parent. The reality, however, is that many still do it because in Germany, as everywhere else in the world, some parents are afraid for their children. But they keep it to themselves. The general view is that children need to be taught to self-reliance."
Ask them on social media parenting groups and they'll proudly tell you that their children go to school on their own from the age of 7-8, sometimes even as young as 6. Newcomers to Germany often express their amazement at the sight of a child this young early in the morning on his bike or on a bus. "When I came here from Paris, I was shocked when my husband told me about this concept," said Tiffany Yan, the mother of two sons. "Today, I'm completely at ease with doing the same."
More than public transport, walking or cycling are the preferred methods, even in bad weather. For distances of a few hundred meters, two kilometers or even more for private schools. In the mornings, the bike paths of Hamburg, Germany's large northern port city, are taken by storm by schoolchildren on two-wheelers or scooters wearing fluorescent schoolbags. While parents are there to guide their children through the first grade (at age 6 or 7, depending on the Länder), they gradually become less involved before stepping aside completely for the Gymnasium (junior high school) at around age 10.
"Parents trust bike paths," said Vianney Guilbaud, the director of the French school's leisure center in Hamburg since 2012. "The children go to their extracurricular activities on their own, which makes life easier for parents." He remembers organizing a walking bus with neighbors before letting his son walk the 600-meter-trip to school as early as first grade. "He'd meet his classmates along the way; it looked like a seasonal migration," he recalled. The trust of parents goes hand in hand with strict respect for the rules of the road from drivers and pupils alike, who take their bike license at the age of 9. Compulsory throughout the country, this test is supervised by a police officer.
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