Teaching Adolescents To Drive

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28397, 2 October 1957, Page 12

Teaching Adolescents To Drive

The Palmerston North road safety committee is making a most valuable contribution to the purposes of the children’s safety campaign by organising a driving school for adolescents. Strictly speaking, the instruction of these boys and girls has no direct application to a campaign to protect much younger children from road dangers. It will, however, have a lasting indirect application, for the 100 boys and girls who are to be taught should set an example to other motorists, besides driving safely themselves. Learning to drive a motor-car is more than a matter of mastering the intricacies of clutch and gears and of learning traffic requirements by rote, though these are important enough, as the many accidents caused by inefficiency and ignorance show. A driver who is well taught learns, also, habits of care, courtesy, and consideration. If more drivers demonstrated these qualities the highway would be a safer place for everyone.

Adolescence, when reactions are quick and nerves are steady, is probably the ideal age to learn to drive. But the sparse reports of children’s courts and common observation suggest

that too many youngsters have not been given a proper appreciation of the responsibility Of sitting in a driver’s seat. Reputable commercial schools produce efficient drivers. Unfortunately many youths do not learn in this way, acquiring what skill they may from other more or less self-taught drivers. If the Palmerston North experiment is as successful as it should be, the Transport Department might well consider the establishment of permanent driving schools in the larger towns, preferably in association with the commercial instructors. The schools would be welcomed by many boys and girls, who would be prepared to pay a reasonable fee. It would probably pay the department to subsidise the schools as a contribution to road safety. Other pupils might be provided by the courts, if they adopted the practice of requiring juvenile traffic offenders who obviously needed further instruction to take appropriate courses—paying the full cost themselves. This practice has proved useful in the United States, which has had earlier, and wider, experience of the traffic problems now being encountered by New Zealand.