CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Walking to School Alone

NARRATOR: A generation ago, the sight of a seven-year-old trudging to school alone, lunch box in hand, scarcely merited a second glance. Today, in many Canadian neighbourhoods, it may prompt a worried phone call. The share of elementary students who walk to school on their own has plummeted, and some schools now insist that children under twelve be collected by an adult at the end of the day. Whether that caution is prudent or excessive has become a surprisingly heated question.

NARRATOR: Lise Tremblay, who studies child development at a university in Quebec, argues that the pendulum has swung too far. Children who walk without a grown-up, she points out, get daily exercise without any organized program, and, perhaps more importantly, learn to read traffic, judge distances and solve small problems on their own. Tremblay contends that parents' fears are fuelled largely by headlines rather than evidence; the odds of a child being harmed by a stranger, she notes, are extremely low and have not risen in decades. Ironically, she adds, the line of cars idling outside schools every morning makes the street far more hazardous for the few children still on foot.

NARRATOR: Gary Mitchell, who has supervised crossing guards in Hamilton for fifteen years, is unmoved. His worry isn't strangers; it's traffic. Neighbourhoods built decades ago were never meant for today's volume of cars, he observes, and many routes now cross four-lane roads with no guard in sight. Drivers, he adds, routinely ignore the reduced speed limits posted near schools, particularly during the morning rush. Younger children, Mitchell insists, simply cannot gauge the speed of an approaching vehicle, however sensible they may be. He also questions whether the debate is fair to families. A parent with a flexible schedule can practise the route for weeks; a parent working an early shift may feel pressured to send an unprepared child out the door.

NARRATOR: Interestingly, the two agree on more than one might expect. Both favour walking school buses, in which a rotating volunteer escorts a group of children along a fixed route. Tremblay sees them as a stepping stone toward independence; Mitchell, as a sensible compromise. Their quarrel, in other words, is less about whether children should eventually walk alone than about how quickly they should be allowed to. What neither endorses is a blanket age rule, and that, perhaps, is the most telling point of all. Readiness depends on the child and the route, not on a birthday.