If they were “schooled” at an appropriate level they may still have some tendencies towards immediate gratification and self centerdness – but they would also be more effective in staying out of trouble and understanding exactly what trouble they are courting when they do take chances.

You see, they really don’t understand the rules of the road in any way – traffic, vicarious liability, contract law, anthropology, gravity, nothing.

I compare the 18 to 30 crowd I see in the courts (some are friends, relatives and victims, not just defendants) with the proles from the 1960-1970s. I believe they used to be more functional. Not they don’t even have driver’s licenses (anymore). If someone is willing a lot can be done to clean up their situation – and I have done that. It just galls me to be told over and over that nowhere in their life experience were they ever told (insert basic Middle class thing) despite all their years in – you guessed it, public schools.

The public schools seem to overtly declare that they will never attempt to change anyone from the “culture” they came in the door with, not just the ebonics thing but all other aspects of class, mores, thinking and exposure to mainstream society. The schools think it’s wrong to “disturb” the “culture” of the kids.

Rich get richer and the poor get children (and AIDS).

Driver’s training is also a metaphor. If we don’t do something to give these prole kids a better chance in society (through public education) we are going to have a class system such as the UK in 1940 with diction, carriage and pedigree as the main/only determinant of who you are and where you can go in the US. And race will become the dominant factor as well. This country was never about that before.

I am well versed in psychopathy – and I’d refer you to the books of Dr. Robert Hare on that subject. Like the rich, the pyschopaths are generally pretty good in taking care of themselves. The people I’m worried about are not psychopaths, they are just average people of average intelligence who might have been so much more than they were made.

“…inability to comply with traffic laws is a great gateway to law enforcement and the criminal courts.”

See my post on another thread about Elijah Anderson’s book “Code of the Streets,” regarding people who aren’t concerned with following rules.

Parents do know when there is a hidden (or not hidden) defect that requires the kid not to be let behind the wheel. Sometimes the problem is one that is secret and isn’t going to be discussed. That’s life. I don’t have a problem with this.

I just want that decision to be made with due consideration of the child’s future fitting in with his or her cohort. But if it really has to be, that’s life.

Driver’s Ed on the other hand is classroom training in the rules of the road, etc. No one should be graduated without it.

Caroline: I’m sure your son is great. My comments on a public blog are rhetorical and largely based on the problem people I see. As you probably have heard, inability to comply with traffic laws is a great gateway to law enforcement and the criminal courts.

And that impairment is not racially equitable at all. Traffic court is appalling nowadays. A stronger public school driver’s program even boosting the classroom driver’s ed programs would give the proles a better chance making it in this Brave New World.

I routinely see some people in custody for traffic infractions and misdemeanors. You are pretty disfunctional to be in the bucket for a seat belt, turn violation or cracked windshield violation (that’s how it started anyway).

Just had to comment, because last night my older son did his first lesson in the on-line driving course. He’ll be 16 next month, and he’s starting to get excited about driving. This is really fun for me, because even a month or two ago, he didn’t want to learn. Dealing with his autism, DH and I have really come to rely on the boy’s judgment about what he’s ready for, or what he’s not ready for, and the last six months / year we have seen some pretty impressive progress.

Anyway, in general, I’m inclined to trust parents to know their kid, and to decide if their teen is ready and capable of learning to drive. I’m happy that mine is, for a whole bunch of reasons besides the autism and developmental factors.

I’m also happy when responsible parents are looking at their own kids and deciding the opposite. If a kid isn’t ready at 16 or 17, waiting is much safer for that kid, and for everyone else on the roads. Getting a drivers license is a privilege, and not everyone deserves that privilege. Parents are in the best position to judge whether their own kids have enough maturity to responsibly exercise the privilege.

I think the requirement was instituted on the assumption that all kids would be driving as soon as they were old enough to get a license, and I have problems with that assumption.

(My kid, who is ethnically Jewish BTW, gets around the Bay Area on public transit on his own, organizes combos of his fellow youth jazz musicians for both paid and community-service gigs, and is not unusually sheltered.)

Leave the hill schools and cross 580 for Cleveland and Lincoln and you’s find a 9 and a 10. Since I didn’t check out the rest of the scores in Oakland but checked up on two elementary schools that usually score high these exceptional schools may prove the generalization Unclear was putting forth.

Jim Mordecai

Unclear on the Concept Says:
May 21st, 2008 at 2:58 pm
The trend I notice is that if you go to a “Hills” school where the community is wealthy and can raise a lot of private money for the school, you’ll score 9 or 10.

Hillcrest Elementary – 10
Thornhill Elementary – 10
Montclair Elementary – 10
Chabot Elementary – 10
Miller (Joaquin) Elementary – 9
Redwood Heights Elementary – 9
Crocker Highlands Elementary – 9
Kaiser Elementary – 9

Anywhere else…good luck.

I have no problem with a child being banned from training (not education) because he or she is defective or unruly. I believe a parent is in breech of their duties to raise a child to fit into society to haphazardly block education and training because the parent has a whim that they “don’t like” driving or teens driving. I see that attitude too often and it’s not just driving that gets involved. Those kids don’t have a (fair) chance to make it in society alongside normal kids.

And not undertaking appropriate driver’s education and training helps ensure they become worse drivers. All the more reason why all teenagers of suitable age and deportment should undergo professional driver’s training, followed by supervised parental behind the wheel training which I submit is not the source of mayhem on the roads.

Is your point here that you can make your boy a better man by keeping him out of professional training until he turns 18 and is on his own? Because that is absolutely typical of what I see and hear of why some of the backward people I deal with never learned how to swim, bank, write a letter, conduct the most basic consumer business… their parents always told them they couldn’t do anything until they were “older”.

Meanwhile Asian and Jewish kids are running cash registers, running businesses, and navigating civil relations with adults by the time they are 15, not to mention traveling alone or lightly chaperoned, and conducting themselves well in public by 17.

One of the reasons I have seen kids with potential refuse to go to college is that they have been so sheltered and crippled by certain families they can’t function as adults at 18 or even 20 or more.

The driver’s license is more than a rite of passage – stop confusing it with a parental license to drive the family station wagon all hours. It’s is very important to get the kids ready for the possibilities they face at 18 and that darn well includes making sure they are skilled and licensed to drive.

The Senate is about to reinstate the Draft. Age 19 is the primary target for draft. Being an adult is serious business and a normal “child” gets a license at 16 or immediately thereafter.

In any case, this is way OT. I do agree with a lot of your notions about tracking troubled kids.

They are full of excuses as to why their otherwise normal child must be protected/sheltered/held back, etc.

These people have several broken points of view:

One, they think they and their child have forever to grow up. Well it’s later than you think.

Two, they do not believe in ANY exposure or training or experience until the subject has some urgent emergency need to be an adult. They don’t teach them swimming either because the kiddies “might drown”.

These parents usually prevent the kid from getting “dirty” in any way least they catch a cold.

They are not doing their jobs as parents.

This Brave New World we are living in is tough and is about to get really tough. The next generation is going to be experiencing falling standards of living and severe competition for middle class life. As I see the wreckage of people in the criminal (and civil courts) I see people who were never prepared to make it in life, and there are more of them now than in 1980.

And yes I notice that certain ethnics and types of people raise their kids to be self sufficient better than certain others. The Holocaust survivors and their families in particular seem to have no illusions about being able to take care of oneself and realize the government can never be relied upon for protection.

You don’t get a child a license to turn the family car over to them. You get the child a license because the age of the license determines insurance rates and non-possession of a license is used to disqualify applicants for responsible positions (like civil service janitor). There is a difference between qualifying them for licensure and giving them a car.

But all this involves the value of strategic planning and being prepared – future orientation.

This is a sore point for me. I deal with people of all ages, 18 to 40+ who wind up dead or in dire straights because they have NEVER had the most simple (middle class?) experiences because their bad families and their bad schools “didn’t think” they needed the experience, training, education, exposure, or anything else. They apparently thought children raise themselves and become adults just like the real adults.

Car driving involves legal training, hand eye co-ordination, learning rules of the road and fitting into traffic, classroom and interaction with teachers, time pressure testing, getting your legal documents in order, etc. I see grown men & women who have never had it. Children of advanced age.

And you would block this training from your child while having their cohort be so trained… where does that get your kid in life? I’ll tell you. A person trained to not learn anything until it’s an emergency. All their lives.

Now lets talk about sex ed… Same point. Banking, Credit, Job experiences…

Ironically, this is the part that (as the parent of a non-driving 17 1/2-year-old) I’m not into:

“I would reinstate driver’s ed and driver’s training in the public schools as a priority so that every public school child who is safe to do so would have a driver’s license at age 16 to 18.”

SFUSD just dropped its requirement that students take driver ed to graduate — in time for my son not to have to take it. Parents around San Francisco are rejoicing, because so few of our kids are otherwise likely to be driving any time soon and it takes a pain-in-the-butt requirement off the table.

My view is that teens shouldn’t be encouraged to drive. Too few of them are mature enough. The fact that my kid and his friends don’t drive is a huge benefit to being a San Francisco parent, in terms of safety and diminished worry about life, limb and damage to the property and safety of others. I think the fact that driver ed encourages teens to drive at all offsets the fact that they may get some info that improves their driving a bit — it’s still a net negative.

My own husband disagrees with me –he’s from L.A., where it’s viewed as child abuse not to get your kid his license and a car the minute it’s legal.