–  In the mid 1930s Amos E. Nyehart, a professor of industrial arts at Pennsylvania State College taught a group of students to drive in his own car with stellar results.

–   The already established Life Adjustment Education and Safety Education movements seized upon the apparent breakthrough, adopted it, and ran with it.

–   Then the Consumer Education movement joined in, and everything was in place for modern driver education.  ( It should be noted here that the utopian promise actually made by the pioneer driver educators was that parental bad driving habits would be eliminated by the shining examples provided by the driver education graduates.)

–   In the 1970s, studies, principally Robertson & Zador and Dekalb, began documenting the fact that the accident statistics for the population of teenaged drivers who had passed driver ed. were virtually identical to those of the population that had not taken the course.  Obviously, traditional high school driver education did not teach good driving.  No surprise, because it was never intended to do that.  It was intended to produce significantly more licensed drivers at lower ages than would otherwise be the case to swell the markets for cars, gasoline, tires, insurance, etc.  The tactic probably was not necessary then.  It certainly is not necessary today.  Driving and cars are routine for contemporary teenagers and their parents who want relief from chauffeur duty.  There is no reason besides institutional inertia not to have effective driver ed. today.

–   By the 1990s, driver education finally acknowledged the truth of the studies, but did not blame itself.  It blamed the kids and attempted to remedy the situation with Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL).  Graduated Driver Licensing instituted various restrictions on teen driving which in and of themselves guaranteed improved statistics.  GDL also mandated more experience for young neophyte drivers before full licensure.  A critical part of this experience was practice driving supervised by their parents.  Their parents?!  Back at the outset it was the parents’ abysmal skills that were supposed to be corrected by the kids’ shining examples.