I’ll never forget my driver’s ed teacher.
My grandma had the patience of a saint.
Seriously.
My then 72-year-old grandmother is the person I credit with teaching me how to drive a car. Well, her and Mr. Malingus, my high school driver’s ed teacher. He’s the one my parents paid to teach me how to handle our family’s Toyota on the road, but it was my beloved grandma who really helped me pass my road test.
In Hawaii (where I was born and raised), you are allowed to obtain a driver’s license at age 15. (Less than a year after I secured my paper license I drove solo from Milwaukee to Point Pleasant, New Jersey, but that’s fodder for another blog.) Subsequently, it was considered a rite of passage for freshman to take a month’s worth of driver’s ed in the school’s library during seventh hour.
But that was more than 20 years ago. These days studies show that many high schools are putting the brakes on driver’s education classes. For example, last year the San Francisco school board considered abolishing driver’s ed as a graduation requirement.
Currently, the state of California only has a handful of school districts that require the course for graduation, the rest offer it as an elective. The reason: In 1990, the state curbed the funding that paid for high school driver’s training, and almost overnight, the behind-the-wheel instruction was eliminated.
According to reports, the state still requires classroom-based driver’s education, but the law is largely ignored. State Department of Education officials said they don’t have the authority to enforce that law.
Not surprisingly, the majority of high school students in California are not complaining. Most say they believe driver’s education should be an option not a requirement. In addition, some students argue that between the full-load of course work they need to complete to fulfill college entrance requirements and the tons of extracurricular activities they are involved in, there’s simply no time to take driver’s ed.
I grimaced when I heard that given that most of the kids I went to school with were much more interested in scoring their license and getting behind the wheel (can you say FREEDOM!) than worrying about getting into college.
Do you think driver’s education courses should be required to graduate?
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