EDUCATION BEST

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19959, 17 November 1934, Page 10

EDUCATION BEST

TRAFFIC SCHOOL SYSTEM In suspending sentence on 287 drivers arraigned for motor violations and giving them copies of the traffic rules of the city instead of fines, Mr Greenspan, a New York Magistrate, lent impetus to the establishment of a traffic violators’ school. Such schools, where those guilty of minor traffic offences are sent instead of being fined or imprisoned, are functioning in Detroit., St. Louis, Minneapolis, and other cities, and the plan is being seriously considered in Chicago. It is actively advocated in New York by the Automobile Club there, and has won the approval of police officials, Judges, and safety experts.

'T want you to leave the court in the knowledge that the Magistrate’s Court of the City of New York does not exist solely for the purpose of fining you,” Mr Greenspan told the crowded courtroom. “I believe that many of you, whether you are summonsed here for incorrect parking or for driving at great rates of speed, do not really know what the existing legal parking or speed regulations of this city are. That is why I am giving you this chance to learn these laws, rather than simply exacting a fine and sending you out of this courtroom poorer but none the wiser.”

This action, which the Magistrate himself characterised as “radical,” was, he added, a compromise between the existing system of fining violators and the system he would like to see implanted, giving the Judge the choice of sending offenders to traffic school where they might learn safe and sane driving habits.

Mr Greenspan said he was convinced that education would do more than fines to stem the tide of motor accidents. “You can no more hope to make motorists obey traffic rules by simply fining them than you can hope to make a small boy hate jam by giving him a sound thrashing,” he said.

•'Education, not merely the indiscriminate exaction of fines, is the logical medium of simultaneously reducing the city’s annual appalling motor death and accident toll and relieving the disgraceful congestion which now exists in the city’s traffic courts.” Plans have been completed for the establishment of a school for the city and to this offenders may elect to be sent, subject, of course, to the approval of the Magistrate. There is a clear line of demarcation between offenders guilty of minor infractions and offenders of a more serious kind. In the event of being sent for the course of lessons the offender would have to attend all the sessions, and, moreover, would be required to average at least 70 per cent, at examinations in order to pass. Those who succeeded would be given a certificate: failure to “graduate” would entail a fine. The school schedule at present mapped out is four sessions of two hours each, held weekly.