Teaching 11-year Olds To Drive – An Absolute Waste Of Time

Regular readers will know that the idea of giving driving lessons to 11-year olds isn’t new. I first caught wind of it last year, and it has been repeated since. It goes back to at least February 2012.

So it was interesting to hear of a “pioneering” (maybe that’s a bad misspelling of “plagiarised”) and “revolutionary” scheme in This Is Bath which teaches… 11-year olds to drive. Maybe someone should explain to This Is Bath hacks what “pioneering” and “revolutionary” actually mean, because they obviously don’t know.

By teaching safe driving at a younger age, this revolutionary programme has the potential to save hundreds of lives each year.

Complete bollocks. Unless it can turn every child in the country into a law-abiding citizen who never goes on to commit a crime for the rest of their lives, it will have no effect on casualty rates at all. That’s because the main cause of accidents among young drivers is attitude. Yes, skill levels are also involved, but in an extremely complex way.

The older people are, the less likely they are to have an accident – and remember that not all new drivers are 17-years old. You get loads of 20- and 30-somethings, and yet 17-25 year olds dominate the accident statistics by a huge margin. That’s largely because the brain doesn’t mature until around 25-years old, and the younger someone is, the less mature the brain is.

It should be obvious that most 11-year olds don’t remember important things they were taught back then when they reach 17. So driving lessons at that age can only ever have any sort of benefit if they are continued regularly – just like music lessons. But someone who spends their entire childhood learning to play the violin can still turn into a little psychopath when behind the wheel of a car at age 17. Still, at least they’ll be a psychopath who can play violin.

And that’s my point: they behave how they want to behave. The 17-year old who took kiddie-lessons when he was 11 will still behave like a prat – he’ll just be a prat who could behave differently if it suited him. And don’t forget that those lessons for 11-year olds aren’t cheap. They go for about £60 an hour, so doing one hour a week for the period 11-17 years will set someone back £15,000!

Remember that these courses are run by businesses, not a charities. Being able to charge £60 an hour from wealthy (but not very bright) parents is a brilliant sales scheme, but that’s all.

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