Teach Your Children Well: One Man’s Crusade to Revive Driver’s Education

The vehicle pictured above is called the "Skid Monster." It's late- model Toyota Camry with casters attached to the rear that cause the car to handle the way you'd expect a Toyota Camry with casters instead of wheels to handle. Larry Roberts, the duly- elected Fayette County Attorney in Lexington, KY, would like to teach your children how to tame it. The state of driver's education in this country is generally considered to be abysmal. One by one school districts across the country have dropped driver's ed from their curriculums, sacrificed along with the majority of vo- tech classes on the altar of common core standards, No Child Left Behind, and efforts to "teach to the test." Lexington hasn't had driver's ed in the public schools in decades. The cost of private instruction can be prohibitive. Kentucky Driving School, which operates out of the Louisville area, charges $65 an hour for instruction to teach the basics of automotive operation. Small wonder, then, that most parents opt to do it themselves. Whether or not the parents are good drivers themselves doesn't much matter. Larry Roberts has been the Fayette County Attorney, which makes him the chief prosecutor in the lower District Courts, since 2006. The idea for the Fayette County Attorney Driver Education Program was hatched in 2010 and the first class was in 2011. It is not a basic driver's course. Participants are required to have either their driver's license or their learner's permit coupled with a minimum of 20 hours of driving instruction logged into their Kentucky Driving Manual. The fundamental flaw in driver's education as it is normally done, either by parents or professional instructors, is that it can't really teach a kid what to do when control is lost. You can tell a novice driver that he should "turn the steering wheel in the direction that the back of the vehicle is skidding," as the Kentucky Driving Manual advises. Until someone actually feels the rear wheels start to come around in an attempt to meet their front counterparts, it's all just words on a page. With most driver training being done on public roads there's no way to allow a novice to learn by doing when it comes to skid recovery. What's needed is a 5 acre asphalt pad built on top of a landfill, with plenty of empty space on three sides of it for a teenager to spin a Camry into the weeds. (The fourth side is occupied by metal bleachers, but they sit empty until graduation on the last day of the five day course. Hopefully, the kids have all mastered the skid monster before their loved ones are literally placed in the line of fire, so to speak.)   from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com

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