Will Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) improve the actual, behind-the-wheel performance of young drivers, or will it merely give them a better statistical profile?
Clearly, if enforced, the standard provisions of GDL regarding night driving, alcohol, seat belt use, and the number of teenaged passengers must result in better statistics. Indeed, a compelling argument could be made that these restrictions were designed specifically to produce improved statistics by artificially reducing obvious risk factors through legal fiat, while disregarding completely the need for upgrading the knowledge and skill of young drivers.
GDL prescribes substituting experience for knowledge and skill. Practice does make perfect, but only if one practices and right things. Experience by itself is no guarantor of learning or of competence. Would any sane adult actually prefer a merely experienced surgeon to an excellent one, or a merely experienced lawyer to one who wins, or an experienced pilot to one with a proven safety record, or an experienced plumber to one who will fix the leak? Experience, by itself, produces only familiarity and is most unlikely to yield mastery.
The quality of GDL’s mandated experience is itself highly suspect. Parents are responsible for supervised practice driving which provides the experience. These parents, by and large, are the very same bunglers we encounter and complain about daily in traffic, yet GDL earnestly calls upon them as models and mentors for teenaged drivers in training. Of course, some parents will certify the driving experience without even attempting to provide it.
GDL is a crutch to prop up traditional driver education, which was shown to be of little or no value by the respected DeKalb Study done between 1977 and 1983 in DeKalb County, GA. GDL attempts to substitute experience for knowledge and skill which never were fundamental concerns of driver ed. Driver education’s method has always been preaching good citizenship and mature judgment rather than teaching good driving. Traditional driver education’s unchanging core belief is that good intentions can somehow produce good driving without essential understanding and competence. This nonsense is so fully institutionalized that when the parent of a youthful driver killed in a crash which was clearly his own fault says in despairing disbelief, “He was a good kid. No alcohol or drugs. This kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen to him.” we agree immediately and completely. We attempt to console, and we never even consider the obvious truth that it was not the child’s character that killed him, but his driving. In all other areas of education, formal and informal, it is taken for granted that mastery is the basis for safety.
A final absurdity of GDL is its provision for penalizing novice drivers who commit a serious traffic offense or cause a crash. Is it not expected of a novice in any field that he will perform less than perfectly?
A focused, meaningful, efficacious driving experience program which illustrates concepts with real-world situations, deepens understanding, develops skills, proves tactics, builds good habits, sets up barriers to bad ones, includes as many different road, traffic, weather and light conditions as possible, and rationally analyses and resolves all questions/problems leads to maturity and control. An extensive apprenticeship program of this type will produce attentive, informed, relatively sophisticated young drivers eager to keep learning and polishing their skills through the rest of their driving careers. GDL is not such a program. It is likely to produce better statistics, but it is most unlikely to improve driving.
Excellent driver ed. is the means to excellent driving, which is the most feasible, most direct means to road safety. Sweeping reform is needed. Happily, the hardest part of that job has already been done. The Helios Institute’s textbook, JOYRIDING: A Practical Manual for Learning the Fundamentals of Masterful Driving, provides the philosophical, psychological, and informational bases for true driver education, and it is available to students, parents, and teachers.