Every weekday afternoon during the school year, there’s a sighing sound from the street outside our house as a yellow bus disgorges its teenage passengers. You hear a bit of laughter, a few “goodbyes” and then, down the street, comes a troupe of hunchbacks.
These children have enjoyed all the nutrition and orthodontia that American suburbia has to offer, yet day after day they trudge home like sack-laden serfs. Once pupils hit middle school, they begin coming home bent almost double under the weight of the things they must carry.
“Feel this!” they may say, holding out a Gore-Tex contraption that apparently contains a boulder, or lead.
“That’s terrible,” you commiserate with a touch of despair, because, really, what can you do?
I’ve toyed with the idea of weighing my own children’s backpacks, but, to be honest, I’d rather not know how much they’re hauling around. It would worry me. I’d be anxious about their spines. I’d fret that underneath their shirts they sport red welts where the shoulder straps cut into their flesh. Better to look away — yet it’s impossible not to see the astonishing piles that must travel back and forth each day: thick hardback history, math and science textbooks, lab notes and composition books and novels, Latin and art and poetry in soft cover; not to mention calculators and water bottles and sneakers and sweats and cleats and shin guards and maybe a trombone or two.
Like most parents, we’ve tried to rebel. Once we made a stab at equipping children with two sets of books so that one text could live at home and the other in the locker at school, but the cost was ruinous and a fledgling buy-back scheme never took off. We’ve tried rolling backpacks (sometimes over the objections of school administrators, who seem, as a body, disinclined to let children use the things). That didn’t help, either: One suffers as much physical strain from yanking a rolling ton up a flight of stairs as one does from just bravely shouldering the thing.
This week’s New Yorker beautifully captures the bleak drudgery of backpack culture: The cover shows a little girl trundling along, leading a donkey laden with all the things she needs for school. The joke, of course, is that it’s our children who are the beasts of burden.
Will they labor thus forever? Probably not. I wouldn’t be surprised if ours is the last cohort of American children to groan under these preposterous backpacks. E-books are making their stealthy incursions, and by the time today’s teenagers are sending their own children to school, the advent of the Kindle and Nook — and the marvels surely to follow — will make hauling today’s massive L.L. Bean backpacks seem as bizarre and unwholesome as applying leeches for fever. Mind you, a child who drops a leech on the playground is going to get yelled at a lot less than one who drops an iPad.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
