Students need to learn to drive

REARVIEW:As you read this, thousands of Leaving Cert students are finishing their dreaded exams and have now been churned out into society with a range of skills and knowledge that they will put to good use in going to college or getting a job.

They will, no doubt, be more proficient than I at theorems and more knowledgeable on Yeats and Keats. Some of what they have learned will be useful to them until they day they die and some will already be consigned to the mental wastebin. But there is one skill they will use almost every day for the next 70 or so years: driving.

Yet most teenagers finish school having had no formal education in it, even though it is up there with reading and writing in terms of importance.

We have all seen the teenage driver approaching within an inch of your bumper and overtaking on a bend – a road death statistic waiting to happen – and the 30-something-year-old driver tipping along in the overtaking lane at 80km/h who has clearly never been introduced to a copy of the Rules of the Road.

But these are victims of the way driving is taught – my own case I think is typical. Aged 17 and a day I was taken down to the beach by the Mammy and shown how to move the car without cutting it out (I had been regularly moving it about the backyard without permission during the previous 18 months).

The next training I received was a couple of weeks before the test, when a professional instructor advised me what bad habits I should avoid during the test. The implication was that I could go back to them with abandon once the test was passed. Of course the important skill of driving is much more than being able to move the car. It is about anticipating danger, being courteous to other road users and so much more. It really should be a mandatory Leaving Certificate subject.