The
Art Of Driving
Now come
back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people 200 years ago still
survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at
the
age of eleven. Without
everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so
everybody is there, IQ
notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a
hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned
loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing
nearly unqualified trust in
drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state
schooling?
An analogy will
illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that
we hand three sticks of dynamite
and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives.
You'd have to be an idiot to agree
with my plan — at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school
about human nature and human
competence.
And yet gasoline, a
spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an
assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is
available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.
The average tank holds fifteen
gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or
dispensee. As long as gasoline is
freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we
allow access to a portable
substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into
infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars — why are novice
operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up
to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
It should strike you
at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are
competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist
instruments would have written a tragic
record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all
auto mishaps are accidents, and
while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous
number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of
global terrorism is a favorite cover
story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the
tale the public is sold. According
to the U.S. State Department, 1995 was a near-record year for terrorist murders; it saw 300 worldwide (200 at
the hand of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka) compared to 400,000 smoking-related deaths in the United
States alone. When we consider our
assumptions about human nature that keep children in a condition of confinement and limited options, we
need to reflect on driving and things like almost nonexistent global terrorism.
Notice how quickly people learn to drive
well. Early failure is efficiently corrected, usually self-corrected, because the terrific motivation of
staying alive and in one piece
steers driving improvement. If the grand theories of Comenius and
Herbart about learning by
incremental revelation, or those lifelong nanny rules of Owen, Maclure,
Pestalozzi, and Beatrice Webb, or
those calls for precision in human ranking of Thorndike and Hall, or those nuanced interventions of Yale,
Stanford, and Columbia Teachers College were actually as essential as their proponents claimed, this
libertarian miracle of motoring
would be unfathomable.
Now consider the intellectual component
of driving. It isn't all just hand-eye-foot coordination. First-time drivers make dozens, no, hundreds,
of continuous hypotheses, plans,
computations, and fine-tuned judgments every day they drive. They do this skillfully, without being graded,
because if they don't, organic provision exists in the motoring universe to punish them. There
isn't any court of appeal from your own
stupidity on the road.
I could go on: think
of licensing, maintenance, storage, adapting machine and driver to seasons and daily conditions. Carefully
analyzed, driving is as impressive a miracle as walking, talking, or reading, but this only shows the
inherent weakness of analysis since
we know almost everyone learns to drive well in a few hours. The way we
used to be as Americans, learning
everything, breaking down social class barriers, is the way we might be again without forced schooling. Driving
proves that to me.
5 years ago I had warts, I was treated with some liquid applied to the warts they continued to grow and spread... The next 2 doctors did laser surgery to remove them. 1 year after the surgery, they grew back close to where the 1st ones were' so I was finally told it was hpv. I have had it for very long time, I contract it from my cheated boyfriend and I found out he was also infected and I end up the relationship between us. the warts was so embarrasses because it started spreading all over I have be dealing with this things for very long time the last treatment I take was About 2 years ago I applied natural treatment from Dr onokun herbal cure, a week after applying the treatment all the warts was gone. it's now 2 years and some months I don't have single wart or any symptoms of hpv. wow"" it's great, Dr onokun has finally cured me. Anyone living with hpv contact Dr onokun for natural treatment.
ReplyDeleteHis email address: dronokunherbalcure@gmail.com