Traditional high school driver education has failed. That is not a debatable point. It is fact. For decades, studies have shown no difference between the group driving records of young novice drivers who have successfully completed driver ed. and those who have never taken the course.
Once informed of this world-wide phenomenon numerous groups and individuals concerned with highway safety gave up entirely on driver education and turned instead to technology and engineering to prevent crashes or lessen their effects.
Others, however, remained loyal to driver education. For an extended period they claimed that the studies were invalid and tried to disregard them. Finally though, even they had to acknowledge driver education’s failure. Incredibly, they did not examine its core values and standard practices to discover the reasons. Instead, they blamed young drivers’ inexperience, insisted that driver ed. was still legitimate and valuable, and invented Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) to address the inexperience.
GDL is usually understood to have three main components: 1. A progressive series of licenses for teenagers. 2. Practice driving. 3. Driving restrictions.
A PROGRESSIVE SERIES OF LICENSES FOR TEENAGERS: These range from beginner to fully licensed driver. Each successively higher level of license is issued based upon adequate performance over a specified period of time spent gaining experience at the preceding level. Each higher level license grants additional privileges.
PRACTICE DRIVING: This is driving directly supervised by the parents in the family car. It is completed before issuance of the initial license, while the learners permit is in force.
DRIVING RESTRICTIONS: These are imposed ostensibly to control the amount of risk encountered by apprentice drivers as they progress through the steps of licensing. They certainly ensure improved statistics. They include, but are not limited to: restrictions on night driving, direct supervision by a licensed driver, higher minimum age requirements for licensure, probationary licenses that are automatically revoked upon conviction of a serious moving violation.
It must be noted here that during the early 1960s all of the restrictions mentioned above were denounced by driver education itself as legislative attempts to deny the privilege of driving to juniors.
Driver education’s leaders believe that GDL is the final piece in the puzzle of teaching young people to drive. They are mistaken. Experience is no guarantee of mastery.
In its simplest form, experience means only that one has lived through some event. Experience of that kind can provide memories and even entertaining stories to tell. It can affect one emotionally, but it is unlikely to increase specific knowledge, understanding, or skill.
A second type of experience is that gained by doing something – perhaps once, perhaps repeatedly over a long period of time. For learning to result from this type of experience, circumstances are all important. For example: the experience of touching a hot stove teaches any conscious human an unforgettable lesson instantly with no requirement for study or thought. A completely different situation is that of a boy who swings his baseball bat like an ax. Virtually every time he hits the ball, it goes downward instead of up and outward as it should. No amount of experience can ever change that, because the boy does not know his swing is incorrect. He will keep hitting soft grounders forever unless somebody notices his mistake and teaches him the right way to swing.
On the other hand, some things can be understood only through experience: orgasm, addiction, victory, humiliation, comfort, remorse, combat, joy ….
In driving, experience is the only way to learn skid control. It is also the only way to learn to engage the clutch of a stickshift vehicle. Books, lectures, videos can never teach such things by themselves. One must “get the feel” of them.
An epiphany seems to result spontaneously from one stunning experience. In fact, it does not. Before an epiphany can occur, experience must be perceived to contradict accepted belief, creating cognitive dissonance. At this point the mind begins trying to stop the dissonance. It thinks critically. It thinks creatively. It struggles. It plays. Eventually, with luck, its efforts provide all the bits of information needed to solve the problem. Finally, some triggering experience stimulates the mind to synthesize those bits of information into one clear concept.
Suddenly everything falls perfectly into place. This “Aha!” moment seems to be a miracle, a cosmic revelation provided by a singular experience. It is not. It is the culmination of extended mental effort dedicated to solving the puzzle. The triggering experience would be completely insignificant except for its chance occurrence after the mind’s discovery of all the relevant data. Clearly, experience is indispensible to epiphanies, but it does not create them.
When we say that we have “learned from experience,” what we usually mean is that somehow we have grown through doing something over a period of time. We recognize that before, we were outsiders. Everything seemed foreign. Now, we are insiders. We are comfortable with the people, the tools, the vocabulary, the area, the routine, etc. We can’t really explain how we changed, but we know we did. In crediting experience for these changes, we forget our own efforts to learn from it. We entered these situations, and we did not leave them. We persevered. We wanted to understand. We worked to understand. We watched and listened and tried. The only way to learn from experience is to pay very close attention to it and analyze it carefully and constantly. By itself, experience is neither an efficient nor a reliable teacher.
Even massive experience cannot be relied upon to instruct. There are numerous accounts of people who spent entire lifetimes involved in one field or another, but “ never learned anything about it.” When we need a doctor, lawyer, or plumber, do we want experience or ability? There is no question that, regardless of his experience, we want the doctor who will cure us, the lawyer who will win our case, and the plumber who will stop the leak.
Experience brings familiarity. Familiarity can easily be mistaken for proficiency. Any old hand at something will exhibit a kind of ease at his work, a relaxed effortlessness with his tools, but is he a master or an experienced bungler? Only the quality of his finished work can tell that.
Experienced drivers are familiar with driving. They appear calm and at home behind the wheel. However, despite decades of experience they make rookie mistakes in profusion. They routinely tailgate, drive distracted, fail to control skids, drive too fast for visibility and/or traction conditions, cannot merge without creating slowdowns and confusion. Worst of all, they do not even turn into the correct lane or use their signals.
GDL honestly believes that these drivers are knowledgeable, skillful, and fit to be models and coaches. GDL legally assigns them the primary responsibility for teaching their children to drive properly. GDL thus substitutes familiarity for competence and experience for knowledge. GDL contradicts driver education’s utopian original promise that parents and ultimately all drivers would learn good driving from the shining examples set by its graduates. GDL ensures that future drivers will be no better than current ones and that the public and the professionals alike will wonder what to do about the abysmal state of driving and the high death rate.
Experience is an essential element in education, though the size and character of its role vary according to the subject matter. Practice really does make perfect, but only if one practices the right things in the right ways. Unfortunately, the experience provided by the vast majority of parentally supervised practice driving curricula will prove frighteningly deficient.
Student performance and progress in everything from basic vehicle control to traffic tactics will be judged in accordance with the supervisors’ rudimentary, distorted, and garbled understanding of driving. Road, weather, and traffic events might be misinterpreted, mistaught, and mislearned or ignored completely. Mere operation of the car on public roads can be mistaken for good driving. It always has been. Clumsy, even dangerous driving will not be corrected. It will be ignorantly accepted, perhaps even praised, and it will become habitual. The supervisor will use his experience, misidentified by GDL as mastery, to justify and pass on his own deficient driving style. For example: An habitual tailgater believes that everything ahead happens suddenly and unexpectedly. He is convinced that all other drivers are either stupid or intentionally threatening. This is because his normal following distance is inadequate to allow detailed and timely perception of most developing road events. With information always coming in late, he is always surprised and often outraged. His driving is a jerky, taxing chaos of rapid reactions to near-emergencies mixed in among periods of boring routine apparently requiring no attention at all. His years of unhappy experience , resulting directly from his own grossly incorrect driving technique, have persuaded him that driving really is just a constant defensive battle against idiots. He will never know the pleasure of driving in an informed, planned, graceful way. He will never understand what real control in driving is. His grotesque and damaging parody of driving will be passed on to his child, because the child’s practice driving experience must necessarily be shaped by his parent’s beliefs.
To the child, traffic events, telescoped and exaggerated in urgency by tailgating will seem to prove the correctness of the parent’s views. He will adopt those views. He will use them to interpret his own driving experiences. Ultimately, just like his parent, he will find driving to be a frustrating and wearing defensive battle against idiots.
Driving will not improve. Traffic will not improve. Road safety will not improve.
Driver education has existed since the early 1930s. If its current ideas about the educational value of experience were correct, by now driver educators would have learned so much from their own experience that teaching excellent driving would be a snap. Driver ed. would not need help. It would be confidently leading an ebullient upward spiral of progress in driving performance all over the world. All over the world though, driver ed. graduates drive no better than drivers who never took the course.
Apparently, despite its vast experience, driver education still does not understand driving. All it can do is go through the motions, parrot the same old clichés that have never worked, and hope for the best as it releases graduates with the promise that “All they need is some experience.”
How though, can any driver ed. teacher who cares about his subject or his students willingly turn them over to unqualified people to finish teaching what he has only begun? One plausible answer is that the driver education experts actually do consider their own knowledge and skill levels to be no higher than those of the average experienced drivers in the street.
Finally, it must be stated with all possible force and clarity that the parents are blameless in all of this. They are the innocent victims of the road safety/driver education establishment.