| Trained to be Wild |
I've just started travel training with Jay. He's thirteen. In some ways his brain is thirteen. In other ways it's six. He looks street-wise but he's a walking suicide case in traffic. He likes girls. "She's fit", he'll say about a large fashion photoshot in a chain-store window. He loves violent shoot-em-up games in the computer games shop. He supports Man U.
On the other hand, he needs the school staff to tie his shoe laces. He enjoys the physical care doled out to him at the school. He's amazingly willing to be seen out and about with an old geezer like me. He's not yet realised this is none too cool.
I'm going to train him to walk between home and school, which is fifteen minutes and only a few side-streets to cross. This is hardly worth the local authority's payment for two taxis a day. And yet, in his taxi he's in cosy world. Walking to school he's out on the mean streets. They don't look mean, but some of the local teenage characters have made his school one of the biggest problems in the Authority.
When he’s trained up and can travel without his taxi, I’ll be throwing him out into the hard world. I don’t think I, or his mum (who loves him dearly), or the school can protect him on this fifteen minute walk between home and school. And he’ll soon be well equipped to get himself to the town centre – only a bus ride away.
Anything could happen to him there.
Do I have a sinking feeling that I shouldn’t be doing this?
Fleetingly – yes.
But after some thought – no.
He needs to grow up and acquire adult skills. Who am I to say he shouldn’t? He has a right to be a fully paid-up member of the human community.
He may well run a few more risks than other people, but life is like that. In the meantime he is disadvantaged and at risk through not having the street skills and not having had discussions about dangerous behaviour and whom to avoid.
Let’s face it, some of us could be giving travel training to the next generation of urban terrorists or paedophiles as well. We are in no position to know that, any more than the people who teach them to read.
Everybody has a right to read if they can and everybody has the right to make journeys if they are able to do so.
Jay will get his travel training and become a free agent and, hopefully, safe as well. Fingers crossed.
Don Walker
This website has been funded by the Wigan Transport Partnership
whose aim is to promote greater accessibilty to educational opportunities
for students aged between 16 and 19.Content Management websites by Backbone Solutions.com