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 Driver’s Ed Needs a Tune-up
by Tom Campbell
September 4, 2008
Driver’s education is badly in need of a tune-up and the sooner the better. If you needed proof, there was ample evidence for those driving our highways over the Labor Day holiday.
Did someone remove the page of the driver’s manual that said slower traffic was to keep right? For some unexplained reason many drivers have a Columbus mentality of landing in a lane and staying there regardless of how many cars might be lined up wanting to pass. Excessive speed, following too closely and darting in and out of traffic without turn signals gave further proof that courtesy and safety were either not taught or were ignored on our highways.
North Carolina is one of the few states continuing to offer driver’s education. Studies from other states report that those taking driver’s ed have the same or sometimes higher incidences of tickets and accidents as those who had not taken the course.
There are fatal flaws in the program. Where else would you give students thirty hours of classroom instruction, six hours of behind-the-wheel experience and proclaim them ready to drive? We can only hope our surgeons, road engineers, and other professionals get more hands-on experience. An instantaneous improvement to driver’s ed would require more actual driving, but this proposal meets with instantaneous resistance.
Educators insist more classroom time needs to be devoted to academics, not less, and will resist efforts to expand driving during the school day. Most of the driver’s education programs are outsourced to for-profit entities who don’t want to lose the revenue they have. Parents like the idea of schools doing the job; they don’t want to have to pay private instructors or provide the training themselves, which is precisely the reason why the state took over the instruction. But the crux of the argument, as with everything in education, comes down to funding.
North Carolina spends thirty-three million dollars annually on driver’s education, but we don’t have sufficient funding needed to dramatically increase the amount of time students spend driving. Meanwhile, 1,200 teen drivers lost their lives between 1997 and 2006. Bottom line: we have enough funding to do a mediocre job of training teens to drive, but not enough to do an excellent job.
There are video simulation programs available and newer approaches to offline instruction that could significantly improve the quality of instruction while providing better experience to young drivers. And if we aren’t willing for our public schools to pay for more behind-the-wheel instruction, we can certainly require our teens to spend more time driving with adults.
There are options that could improve driver’s education, but unfortunately that doesn’t necessarily translate to improved safety and better manners on our roads. One way or another we need to either eliminate or make significant changes to our current driver’s education. Lives could be saved. |
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