School Signs International

[steepholm]

Today I passed a sign near a primary school, warning drivers to watch out for children. It looked like this, as such signs have for as long as I can remember (perhaps with a couple of minor tweaks):



I suddenly realised that all my life I'd read this sign as showing a little brother being taken to school by his elder sister. Now, I was suddenly filled with doubt. Could the female figure be the mother? I suppose my instinctive reasoning was that she doesn't seem that much bigger than the child. If it's her son, he'd be a bit too big to need his hand held, perhaps. But how do you read it?

This of course got me looking at the international picture. My hasty Google search showed that the UK was an exception: in most countries, it's the male in charge - either leading or guiding a smaller female from behind in the general direction of learning, sometimes at pace, sometimes slowly, occasionally through the medium of jazz dance:



In a few countries, though, there are no females at all. Indeed, the person ar the school-adjacent crossing in France may not even be a child:



Feel free to add your own images to this little gallery - and, even more welcome, your sententious conclusions!

Comments

[lamentables]

I've always read it as older sister. Possibly that's influenced by my only sibling being a brother 3.5 years younger than I am. Also, to the extent that we were escorted to school at all, it was rarely my mother doing it.

I just tested abrinsky:
- Who are these people?
- Schoolchildren
- And their relationship?
- Brother & sister

[steepholm]

Thanks for the research!

I wonder (if they were designing it today) whether they'd have gone with the same set-up - i.e. one smallish child being given responsibility for getting an even smaller child safely to school?

[lamentables]

You've had me wondering the same. I was escorted to infant school on the other side of town, but walked to junior school by myself. That whole 'parents at the school gate' thing is not part of my experience.

And now I'm wondering even about infant school, because I remember going to the sweet shop by myself (back when pennies were enormous and bought soooooo many fruit salad chews, coconut mushrooms, fake tobacco, sweet cigarettes) and that shop was on the way to infant school.

[kalypso]

I can't remember at what age I ceased to be escorted to primary school - a fifteen-minute walk crossing one significant road - but it was definitely before I was nine, because at that point I was asked to escort a five-year-old neighbour for a few weeks while her mother was waiting to give birth/had just given birth.

[nixwilliams]

Ours are definitely parent-and-child, but I always thought the UK ones looked like two kids playing.