Driver ed in the computer age: looking for synergy
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 1992-09-15
This article originally appeared in Vol. 2, Number 3 of Driver/Education, in September, 1992
The metaphors of the automobile age will be helping us express ourselves for some time to come, even as the metaphors of the computer take over. Computer legend Alan Kay says he used the metaphor of the personal car in developing the concept of the personal computer, a term he is reputed to have coined back in the '60s. The car changed lifestyles, social patterns, the urban and rural landscapes. The computer will bring changes of similar scope, Kay believes, once they become fully accessible to everyone and realize their potential.
But just as the early automobiles carried with them some of the design baggage of the horse and buggy days (coach-type wheels and even slots for whips), today's computers carry with them some of the psychic baggage of the heyday of the automobile.
We still like cars and they shape our thinking. Driver educators face a future in which computers will play a huge role. And they'll have to fight for a place in the spotlight with a multitude of other challenges that face educators. As well, driven in large part by computer technology, our educational systems are on the threshold of massive changes. Some are calling it a revolution.
Last year U.S. Education Secretary Alexander Lamar talked about "starting from scratch, breaking the mold." There's so much change going on that the U.S. National Education Association (NEA) can't keep track of it. "Schools now have become the centres of change," says the NEA's Brice Verdier. "The home situation, the churches, clubs, are no longer the way they used to be and everything is centering on the schools...the entire role of the school is changing, as well as the curriculum." Nerl Wahlstrom of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education calls it a "global wave" that's affecting educators everywhere.
In this maelstrom of change, the training and education of drivers will have to find suitable niches to occupy. It may no longer have the luxury of being discrete. Beleaguered by fiscal problems and myriad demands on their time and resources, schools are looking towards programs and objectives that relate to a broad series of outcomes and goals.
"The biggest challenge," says Maryland Program Enrichment Chief Carl Herbert, "is that many programs up to now have been discrete; for example math and physics. Now they will have to relate to real life applications and relate one to the other we can no longer live in our own instructional area."
Driver education has much to offer in this regard. It relates strongly to a broad spectrum of areas ranging from basic law to the physics of motion, communication, social interaction, management and decision-making. And driving has the special advantage that, for a time at least, it occupies a special place in the thinking of teenagers.
However, if computers and multimedia technology are going to be central to these efforts to achieve educational synergy, then driver educators will have to play a leading role in the programming of these technologies. At the moment though, the technologies themselves are changing so fast that it's difficult to know where to begin.
There are big questions concerning which technologies are best to use and how it's best to use them. Alan Kay has a warning for those who would make the attempt. They should be wary of jumping to conclusions about the capabilities and role of computers.
"We should not draw curves from what computers are about right now," he warns." Computers are largely now about imitating paper, about doing 150 year old accounting practices, doing imitations of typewriter compositions, doing simple data base retrieval and all those things which have nothing to do, believe me, with what the computer will be all about 10 years from now."
As all these changes evolve, it seems that the main task for driver educators, as the U.S. Transportation Research Board's Richard Pain points out, will be to decide what needs to be taught, by what means, where, and when.
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