Are Driving Schools Worth It? Part One

Are Driving Schools Worth It?

PART ONE

World-wide, we have this idea, called “face validity”, that it is obvious that more education for young, novice drivers, is a good thing. The problem is…..it isn’t! Study after study after study, from Sweden and Denmark, to England, Canada and the United States, have shown otherwise.

First, let’s examine what Driver Education / Training is, in its’ general context. By design, classroom training (the Driver Education portion) should give a student a better grasp of the laws governing roadway use, signs and markings used by their respective country, and a general idea of both the vehicle and how it handles. All of this is done in roughly 30 hours or so. Then, comes the “practical” side, the in-car training.

I can only speak of this, with authority, in terms of United States training; it tends to be much longer, and more detailed in other countries. Most states still use the “30-and-6” rule, where 30 hours of classroom and 6 hours of in-car are required/recommended. To see what your state uses for Graduated Driver Licensing rules, go to http://www.iihs.org/laws/graduatedlicensestatelaws.aspx?StateAbbr=AL and select your state from the drop-down menu. Some states also require a Driver Education course, either from a public school or a commercial driving school.

The major problem in ANY driver education course, whether it is public or commercially given, is the lack of motivation and inspiration to actually teach SAFE driving. Instead, the SKILL of driving is focused on, by both the student and the teacher, because the end-result desired is to pass the road test to become licensed. A SKILLFUL driver is NOT necessarily, a SAFE driver. It has been my sad experience, in teaching in 3 states and conducting seminars in many others, that the majority of driving schools fall under this category, whether meaning to or not.

Many of the instructors I have met have been either poorly trained, or hardly trained at all, and they tend to teach “Here’s How I Drive” lessons, without giving thought to WHY a certain technique should be used, WHEN braking is more harmful than good, HOW to safely negotiate curves and tight turns, etc. They simply check off on the lesson plan that the student was satisfactory at a certain task.

Similarly, classrooms have devolved into relying on reading a handbook, viewing a few videos/DVD’s, and then testing on what was read or seen. Instructor interaction (called “participative Lecture”) is almost non-existent, except for the occasional commentary of “here’s how I handle that situation”. Classrooms that I have visited tend to have, to save costs, textbooks that are 10 or more years old, and no solid agenda for a parent to view on exactly what their teen is going to learn, how it will be determined if learning occurred, or even what the testing will entail. A parent would, rightfully, be angered if a school teacher for, say, English or Math, treated the student’s education the same way. Speaking of which, even in the public school system, many of the “Driver Education” teachers are NOT licensed to be one, as ordained by their K-12 Teaching Certificate.

So, just what is being accomplished here? Is it all bad? Of course not. The classroom AND behind the wheel training are valuable for learning WHAT the rules are. But they do little, if anything, to teach WHY the rules are there, and WHY a driver should utilize safer driving practices. To make matters worse, almost everyone seems to think that they are a better driver than others, and such training is a waste of time. And yet, close to 40,000 people, 2-4,000 of which are teens, die every year on US roads.


The next section will show results from around the globe, many of which are taken from the LSEDE (Large-Scale Evaluation of Driver Education, 2010 Update) which can be downloaded in a pdf format from: https://sites.google.com/site/parentinstructor/my-forms (scroll down to LSEDElit). This link also has many other informational documents for those interested in driver safety, especially as it relates to teens.