Here’s an interesting driving story from America.
In the USA, anyone who wants to drive has to do a driver-training course, and these can be completed in high-school or using a commercial driver trainer (a bit like an ADI in the UK, I guess). Then they can take the state driving test.
There is a bill being considered which proposes that parents would be able to teach their children if they’re under 18. The parent would have to buy an approved curriculum pack, be at least 25 years old, and have no drink-driving convictions or other driving “infraction” on their records.
A home-schooling lobby organization, the Christian Homeschool Network of Washington, backs the bill and believes it would produce safer drivers.
“After all, parents have a vested interest in the safety of their children out on the road,” said DiAnna Brannan, the group’s director of advocacy and volunteer lobbyist. She added that the organization doesn’t think driving schools are bad; the group just wants another option for driver’s education.
There is a certain amount of naïvete in that quote.
Parents may have a “vested interest in the safety of their children out on the road”, but they also have a vested interest in getting them on the road as quickly and cheaply as possible. The same organisation admits this:
Brannan told legislators at a hearing last week that home-schooling driver’s education also would be a “huge cost savings to families.”
Yep. A HUGE amount of naïvete. Read the rest of the story and it seems others in the States agree.
Ironically, this is almost the mirror image of what many people would like to see over here – that only professional tuition should be allowed. We, of course, already do it more or less the way the Americans are considering doing it, and look at the mess young drivers make of themselves on the roads over here.
Bereaved parents may shed buckets of tears at the funerals of their little darlings, who’ve plastered themselves across farmland next to many rural roads, but they were anxious as hell to spend as little as possible getting them behind the wheel in the first place.
The Americans had better be warned. They’re opening massive flood gates with some very nasty stuff behind it if they aren’t careful!