CHILDREN ON THE ROADS

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LIX, Issue 87, 1 November 1938, Page 2

CHILDREN ON THE ROADS

The continuous slaughter of children upon British roads is the most

harrowing of all traffic tragedies, asserts the London Observer! If this persistent death-rate had been foreseen, we should have thought once, twice, arid thrice before launching upon the common highway a locomotive empowered to -range at will among its other users. As it is, we have to fight our way back? to a lost standard of civilisation, and use every available means to harmonise a kind of transport that has become indispensable with the dictates of humanity and the workings of human nature. The conformation of the roads and their equipment with safety signs are still imperfect, and the disciplining of drivers is one of the most conspicuous failures of the British judcial and magisterial system. But in the light of these facts it is all the more important that children should be efficiently instructed in that "sixth sense" of danger which is so pressingly needful to their preservation. In a letter to the Times a preparatory schoolmaster describes how he has organised a model traffic course where his boys may be familiarised from the earliest age with all perils in which the roads abound, and trained in those habits of precaution which are the nearest thing to an infallible safeguard. There is no sort of elementary education more relevant to the world in which we live.