People can be such... You know what I want to say!

[vt_maverick]

so your saying that its more important to have sports than to have people the ability to get back and forth to work and school...i know that as soon as i turned 16 i HAD to have a job...how am i supposed to get to work?? mind you that i lived 35 miles away from my school.....45 minute drive EACH way (daily) plus going to work...


ya, i wanna ride the bus and organize all of that.

easy to take away others priviledges when it doesnt affect you...

A big +1 there. I played soccer and worked a 20+ hour a week job on top of school and other extracurricular activities. No way that works without a car.

2. Big temptation to skip classes and they are already the least intelligent generation we have ever put out at a highest per pupil cots.

That's a pretty sweeping and insulting generalization don't you think? We used to skip school by walking down the street to the local strip mall - we actually found that driving your car there increased your chances of being seen leaving (our spaces were numbered so it was easy to see if you weren't there).

And how do you substantiate the "least intelligent" remark? Are you basing that on drop-out rates or something? I can tell you for a fact that more people attend college than ever, and our high schools teach much more advanced math, science, and liberal arts classes than when our parents were in school. For example, my parents studied geometry and algebra in their senior years, while I was in the AP versions of calculus, biology, chemistry, and world history.

So hopefully you meant that remark with respect to only driving, but even in that case it's pretty difficult to substantiate. I would think that the main contributors to the problem discussed in this thread are the fact that there are more 16-18 year old drivers (and drivers overall) on the road than in previous generations, as well as the fact that we have exceptionally deficient driver education and testing requirements in this country (especially with comparison to European nations). The point was well-made earlier in this thread that driver's education should also encompass parking, which would probably diminish the number of these kinds of incidents. And I think that another good indicator of driving "intelligence" over time is that insurance companies have always identified the 16-18 demographic as highest-risk, and many even issue discounts for driver's education courses. Given that insurance companies are all about the statistics and probabilities, those actions would seem to indicate that they view the problem as not due to some fundamental intelligence defect specific to this generation, but rather as a common problem of young drivers of any generation due to their inexperience and lack of education.