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I have yet to meet anyone who has a good thing to say about the standard of our driving tuition and testing. How bad is it? Concerned Parent
Worldwide, driver tuition has become more and more extensive, and testing is more stringent. In Kenya, hearsay suggests the process has been heading in the opposite direction.
Rightly or wrongly, there is widespread belief pure competence is not the key ingredient to passing a driving test, and under those circumstances simple business arithmetic dictates that tuition will not be better than it needs to be.
To start with, our circumstances are exceptional. Our vehicle population has increased tenfold in the past three decades, and the number of licenced drivers has exploded accordingly. Teaching and testing is, to a potentially ugly degree, a sellers’ market.
I have not personally researched the process recently, but abundant stories suggest driving instruction (even at major schools) can be inadequate (and worse), and that testing is at best cursory.
There is no definitive highway code, the theory test is not interactively computerised, and, from both say-so and observing traffic, if there is a teach-and-test syllabus in any form it has huge gaps in it.
The training and inspection of instructors and examiners (and the traffic police!) is not readily available public information.
Given the avalanche of new drivers coming onto the roads over the past 30 years, the results are not good, but we should perhaps be amazed that the traffic situation is not even worse. That affirms the view that a big part of competence comes through “learning by doing”.
Bear in mind, too, that more “universal” private motoring is a relatively new social phenomenon in Kenya, so many candidates for a licence have not spent their entire childhoods watching, hearing and learning in the back seat as have beginners in places where private motoring has been commonplace for many generations…and where training and testing is sophisticated and ever-more stringent.
Anywhere in the world, even people who have been one-on-one taught by a highly qualified instructor in a well regulated environment and passed a robust test (based on two books of 400 pages each and undergone computerised situation analysis tutorials and exams) is still a beginner.
I’ve spoken informally to a number of candidates and their reports, independently, are consistent.
My understanding is that many Kenyans enroll for 30 (!) lessons, but with four students packed into each car, each taking brief turns at the wheel! And the test is often conducted in the same way. Not by any standard could such instruction or examination qualify as remotely comprehensive.
Girl students also report having to, er… “defend” themselves against conduct that would normally warrant a formal complaint (or even a criminal charge). The “no means no” principle is compromised by “do you, or do you not, want to pass your test?”
The ratio between this sort of conduct and diligent professional instruction is not in my purview, but I got the sense misconduct (to use a polite phrase) was not uncommon, and it is something those who govern the system might want to take a look into.
Surely everyone realises that the evolution of a better learning ground will take time, but the starting point needs to be a curve that is heading upwards, not downwards.
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