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Should Schools Teach Children How to Ride Bikes?
I learned to ride a bike in the parking lot of a local bank in my small town in West Virginia. On quiet weekend mornings, my grandfather would jog behind me, steadying my seat as I pedaled in circles around the empty lot. As I gained confidence, we ventured out for longer rides along the picturesque Potomac River. Those moments remain some of my fondest childhood memories.
Now, living in New York City, I find myself in a small apartment where storing a bike isn’t practical, and the nearest park is too far to make riding feasible. While many brave souls bike on the city streets, I can’t muster the courage. My 5-year-old son hasn’t learned to ride yet, and I’m unsure how to help him.
Then I stumbled upon a fantastic initiative: public schools in Washington, D.C., are teaching second-graders how to ride bikes as part of their physical education curriculum. What a brilliant idea!
According to a report by Jenna Martin for CityLab, the D.C. public schools’ director of health and physical education, Sarah Williams, has created a program where 475 BMX bikes are distributed across various schools in groups of 25 for several weeks at a time. This program provides intensive cycling lessons to second-graders—addressing a significant gap in biking knowledge among the city’s children.
This bike program is part of a broader effort called “Cornerstones,” which aims to provide specialized education to D.C. students in an effort to bridge the achievement gap between wealthier and less affluent kids. The initiative seeks to ensure that all public school students in D.C. can learn to ride, even those who lack access to bikes or safe places to ride. As Martin notes: “Urban biking has a well-documented equity problem. With the expansion of bike-sharing programs and improved infrastructure, there’s a risk that low-income families will be excluded from the city’s biking resurgence. Universal bike education could change that.”
One of the many contributors to the childhood obesity crisis is the lack of physical activity. In my own childhood, most kids walked or biked to school, but Lauren Thompson, director of the National Center for Safe Routes to School, shared in an interview last year that distance is the number one reason parents cite for not allowing their children to walk or bike to school, closely followed by safety concerns. The scarcity of dedicated bike lanes makes it challenging for kids to travel safely. However, the more people who walk or bike, the safer it becomes for everyone, according to SafeRoutesPartnership.org.
Elected officials often hesitate to allocate more space for bike lanes, believing there aren’t enough cyclists to justify it. Hence, fostering a new generation of kids who feel comfortable biking could help shift the balance from car lanes to bike lanes. D.C.’s bike-share program has already made a small but noticeable impact on easing traffic congestion.
I wish my kids could learn to ride like I did, but given our current situation, that’s not feasible. If their PE class included cycling, I would be thrilled! It would equip them with a valuable lifelong skill for affordable, healthy, and eco-friendly transportation. Honestly, I’d love to hop back on a bike myself—imagine our little family cruising along the river together!
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In summary, teaching kids how to ride bikes in schools could promote physical activity, address equity issues in urban biking, and provide children with a valuable skill for life.