The Highway: Can Driving Be Taught?

The belief that high school driver-education courses produce safer drivers is so sacredly held that insurance companies trim premiums for motorists who have taken them. That gospel was challenged last week by University of California Psychologist Frederick L. McGuire. “There is no evidence,” McGuire told a session of the National Safety Congress in Chicago, “that driver education influences accident frequency or severity.”

McGuire based his claim on a federally supported research project carried out while he was on the medical faculty at the University of Mississippi. He started with two evenly matched groups of 145 drivers; one group learned to drive through driver-education courses; the other had no formal driving instruction. The study showed that after two years the driving-school group had 75 accidents involving 56 persons, while the “uneducated” group had 71 accidents involving 58 people—a virtual draw. A noncontrolled study, comparing 34 drivers who had taken courses with 466 who had not, revealed that the driver-education graduates actually had an accident rate 15% higher than their untrained counterparts.

Readily conceding that a 30-hour driving course, and perhaps the level of instruction in Mississippi, left much to be desired, McGuire maintained that similar conditions exist in many states. Said McGuire: “I am not condemning or praising, but I am saying that the burden of proof is now on driver education to prove it is effective.” The headlong rush to invest millions of dollars in driver-education courses should be halted, he argued, and a small portion of the money spent on further tests to assess their value.