Whatever Happened to Driver Education?
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Corporate managers outsourced manufacturing jobs such as in steel and services such as call centers. School districts did the same with driver education. Higher graduation requirements and reforms that called for everyone to go to college combined to inexorable demands for reducing costs led states to cut their subsidies for driver education teachers and programs. Far more private companies now provide driver training to teenagers than schools do.
What Problems Did the Driver Education Intend To Solve?
Traffic accidents and fatalities is the short answer. From the very beginning of the 20th century, cars killed pedestrians and passengers. By the 1920s, over 15,000 Americans died in auto accidents. Like most economic, political, and social problems in the nation, Americans believed that education–like water, alcohol, and acetone–is an all-purpose solvent. So with more cars on the road, more accidents, policymakers turned to schools. With states funding parts of these programs, district after district offered driver education to prepare the young to be better drivers and thereby reduce road carnage. In teaching teenagers about how the car works, rules of the road, and giving them actual practice on streets and highways, teenagers getting state-issued driver licenses would be better drivers and accidents and fatalities would decrease. Especially as 20th century statistics on car accidents and deaths showed increasing percentages of teenagers involved in fatal accidents. That was the theory.
Driver education, then, is another instance of turning to schools to solve social problems by educating the next generation (rather than attack the actual CONTINUE READING:Whatever Happened to Driver Education? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
