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Drivers education in Kansas

Drivers education in Kansas

Now that I have children who are able to drive or will be eligible to drive soon, I am truly questioning the value of driver’s education in the State of Kansas. My son is now 20 and has a driver’s license, but despite having his license for over a year, he is in no way ready to actually drive on his own.

He attended driver education at Yost Driving School in Wichita and completed the course, which consisted of eight hours of in-class tuition, a written test, and six hours of driving. If the instructor believes the student is competent, the student will be given a piece of paper, which the student takes to the DMV, and et voila, here’s your driver’s license. In my mind, this is nowhere near enough tuition to drive for many people and nowhere near enough time for my son to be safe on the road by himself.

My son is autistic, not to say all autistic drivers are a liability, however, a year after my son got his license, he still has not driven by himself, needing either myself or my wife alongside him as he does not believe that he is safe to drive without a more experienced driver alongside him. Believing that he is likely to make a mistake that could cause a wreck, this is somewhat true; on a few occasions, we had to tell him to stop as he was about to make a bad mistake. This might just be a lack of confidence, but should he be allowed to drive alone? The Kansas DMV says yes, as they allowed him to drive 13 months ago.

My biggest issue with Yost, or maybe Kansas drivers ed in general is that all my son’s on-the-road driving lessons were between 6 and 8am on Saturday, which, in my view, is not an accurate evaluation of a person’s driving ability. To judge someone’s competence, the lessons must be while traffic is on the road for the student to navigate, which is not the case on surface streets at dawn on the weekend.

Hypothetically, if he were driving by himself, and he got in a wreck due to his lack of confidence or ability to drive, and he kills someone, whose fault is it, Yost, the DMV, or my son? This level of driver’s education and the ease of getting a license certainly explains a lot about the piss poor standard of driving in the state. “You’ve done the bare minimum, off you go into the world of driving and cause carnage.”

Thankfully, my son realizes he is not confident in driving alone, but other drivers who believe they are qualified to drive might be driving alone, causing wrecks because they don’t have enough competence or experience. I think the standards for driver education need to be improved. More hours with an instructor and then sitting a test with a DMV examiner are needed to ensure that a person is competent.

Based on my experience, the test itself needs to be more thorough. My US driving test consisted of about 5—7 minutes in the car, backing out of a parking space, right out of the parking lot, two more rights, four left turns, and finally, another left into the parking lot, pulling into the same space I had vacated. My reaction, after being told I passed, was, “Is that it?” I was shocked at how easy the driving test was.

The bottom line is that a one-size-fits-all driving education system is asking for trouble. One student might be competent to drive in six hours, while another might need much more tuition before being prepared to drive alone. This is why I believe a stringent, much harder-than-my-experience test by a state examiner, not an instructor with a profit motive, is needed to determine whether someone is ready to drive.

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