For me, the surest sign of the imminent arrival of autumn is not the changing light, the cooler temperatures, or the ads touting pumpkin-spice flavors.
No, the pending change of seasons is surely marked by the arrival, in the mornings and in the afternoons, of school buses—as unique a sight as the “long shining line” of undergraduate-bearing station wagons that Don DeLillo wrote about so memorably in the opening pages of his novel White Noise.
Yet the sight of school buses does not inspire nostalgia in me as much as relief and even gratitude. Here I must admit one of the great blessings of my life: I have essentially no firsthand experience with school buses.
For the first few years of my educational career, my parents sent me to a private school that expected its students to be delivered by their parents each morning and picked up by their parents each afternoon. (In my three-decade-old recollection, I think my school eventually gained access to a single small school bus, but in my day it was mainly used for field trips.)
Back in the early 1990s, working moms were not the norm, at least among my peers, so it was entirely reasonable for my school to assume that they would be available for this chore. In fact, reflecting on it now, the expectation that moms would be available to drive their kids to and from school is not very different—or any more outrageous—than the expectation that moms would serve their kids breakfast: Each is well within the mainstream of parental duties, but neither is any longer assumed by the public-education bureaucracy. As the late, great National Review Washington editor Kate O’Beirne once said, discussing the “sacred cows” of the federal school breakfast and lunch programs on a Hudson Institute panel: “What poor excuse for a parent can’t rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana?”
I digress.
In my case, it was not my mother but my father who drove me to and from school every day through the second grade, and, to help pass the time on our daily sojourns, we would count the number of school buses we happened to pass en route to school. I cannot be certain of this, but I think we would remember the number counted from one day to the next. What can I say? I was 8 years old, and it amused me.
Even at that age, though, I recognized that being free to count school buses—rather than compelled to ride on one of them—made me one of the lucky ones: I was not among those unfortunate youngsters whose parents were so determined to acclimate them to the world that they not only subjected them to public schools but to a form of public transportation to get there. I knew I had it better sitting in the passenger seat of my parents’ Volvo (or whatever car we owned at that point) than sitting in what I assumed was a stuffy cauldron of loud, rude and raucous kids.
This may strike some as unbearably elitist, but I now see the real risks of parents relying on school buses: This teaches the child to depend on a public service for a basic need—surely a “lesson” that leads to increasing reliance on the state. I am not ignorant of practical considerations, but if a parent is really, truly unable to convey their offspring to school, why not make use of a carpool? That, at least, teaches the child to rely on friends and neighbors. And, if physically possible, the child simply walking to school would send the message that he can rely on himself. Better that than counting on the school bus driver.
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That Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz toiled for so long in the public-education system is a cause for great worry: Walz presumably places great faith in teachers, football coaches, and, indeed, school bus drivers—a misplaced faith in public officials that ought to reside within the family unit.
As for me, I was homeschooled starting in the third grade, so the entire school bus issue was rendered moot. I no longer counted them or paid much attention to them, though if I happened to hear one pull up on our street near the 3 o’clock hour, I said a tiny prayer of thanks that I was already home, happily reading a novel by John Updike or John Cheever or listening to CDs of Mussorgsky or Stravinsky, rather than lugging a heavy backpack off the bus.
In Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan, one character refers to “public transportation snobs”—people who see their use of buses or other means of public conveyance as a sign of their own virtue. I am the opposite. I see nothing inherently good or noble in the taking of a bus. To the contrary, I consider parents transporting their own kids to school to be a healthy sign of familial involvement in childrearing and an entirely salutary resistance to the state.
