You have obviously not been to Stockholm during morning rush. Stockholm have an extensive subway, as well as buses. Or just using the (often quite wide) sidewalks to walk. The amount of kids moving around (themselves) to get to their schools is almost overwhelming.
Oh, and the best schools are really in the downtown area. Which is why children, kids, teenagers use the public transport from all around the metro area by themselves to get to the schools.
And since you comment further below about winter - yes, of course the kids move around like this in the winter too.
Yeah, seeing 7 year olds taking the subway with their parents, just to change two stations later like any other commuter, is always a fun and cool thing to see.
I take my 6 year old on the train all the time a few stops living in London and have since she was much smaller whats wrong with kids on trains (small children are keen on trains and buses btw).
Back the dqy, my parenrs had 1 hour commutes on foot through some woods to catch a bus for another hour to go to school, and back. Nobody cared, it was normal. Now it is normal for kids to take busses and trains themselves to go to school in cities. Times change.
> Most kids know how to use the public transportation
Not kids from age 3-10, and from then on really just a simple one bus or tram route. There's no point pretending this isn't a big issue. You might say it's worth those people leaving the city to make it happen, but saying it's not life-changing for them is doing them a massive disservice.
I can assure you that somewhere around the 6-7 year mark, it is completely normal for kids to take public transport to go to school. It is where I live, it is in Munich (always fun to end up in the school rush hour sharing the subway with all those little ones riding the train like a pro). It is simply normal for those and nothing even remotely special or weird.
The UK is weird about kids. In the 80s I started travelling as a young kid to school on the bus on my own but it's less common now.
+ After a while of my mum taking me on the train to London I just asked her to send me on my own where I could get picked up at the other end, it was fine.
Next time you are in Munich, take public transport of any kind between 7 and 7:30 in the morning on a normal school day, there are sometimes morw school kids of all ages in a given subway car than adults. Pretty funny to witness, seeing the little ones behaving like all the adult commuters, head phones and all until they meet their friends.
I started taking the bus to school from first grade, as did most of my classmates. I'd usually meet a couple of them on the bus and we used to time to copy homework :)
What are the much better schools in the center of Stockholm that you're thinking of?
I think the level of education is really good in most Swedish schools, so if you want one that's farther away for reasons... electric car or public transport
A lot private schools in the US don't offer transportation services. Many school districts in the US won't do transportation if you're trying to go to any school that you're not originally zoned for. So if you want to send your kids to a nicer private school or if the school you're zoned for is trash, you're in charge of getting them to school.
You mean like basically all kids in Munich do, just as an example? Regarding this "better school" thing, that seems to be an almost exclusive US problem.
That all the public schools I know in Europe, either directly or indirectly, are pretty much of the same quality (differences for specific teachers not withstanding).
Sending kids to a different school comes down to personal preferences, ranging from available languages to a school being along the commute of a parent or simple preference of tue kid in question. Selecting where to life based on school quality is simply not a thing I know. I do hear a ton of that from the US so.
> That all the public schools I know in Europe, either directly or indirectly, are pretty much of the same quality
That is definitely not the case here in Romania.
One of my personal projects involves mapping the results of Romania's National Exams for pupils at the end of 8th grade (in here [1] are the results for Bucharest), and as you can see on the linked map/link there are definetly better (colored with green, with average school grade higher than the average for Bucharest) and worse schools (colored with red). Going back to 2015, let's say (meaning at this link [2]), one can see that the schools colored green have remained pretty much the same, and the same goes for the red/worst schools.
I have a close friend who's a math highschool teacher in the French Education system and he confirmed to me that a similar situation takes place in France (the Paris area, to be more exact).
By doing a very detailed due dilligence of schools in Bavaria, the rest of Germany, Austria, France and Sweden, using the most advanced data science methodologies, including all available for money social studies as summarized by Chat-GPT (which reminds to run that again now that version 4 is out) and having the results put into a picture drawn by Dall-E and vetted by the social science PhD I met as my taxi driver (I don't take Ubers).
First of all, taking your kids by car to a much better school. Because we sure as hell cannot afford to own property close to those better schools.