A classical case of invincibilty

Emissions My favourite subject in school was Classical Studies. Heroic tales of ancient Greeks and Romans slaughtering and pillaging and sleeping with their mothers beat geometrical theorems and conjugating verbs any day.

But did it do me any good? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate how fortunate I was to receive the education I did, but to be honest, the vast majority of what I learned was of absolutely no use to me at all. That's not to say it wasn't fun. I can see it now - there's me sitting at the back of maths class with a haircut that would put Elizabeth Taylor to shame, scratching lyrics from Cure songs into the desk and dreaming that someday, somewhere, somehow, I would be a motoring hack for The Irish Times. Ah yes, heady days indeed.

The point I'm trying to make, albeit in a particularly unskilled way, is that I wish I'd learned something a bit more practical in school than how to regurgitate passages from Macbeth. Like driving. There's hundreds of thousands of young people driving around this country on provisional licences, a hefty majority of them having no more instruction in the skills of safe driving than getting yelled at by their terrified fathers for a few hours before being unleashed on the roads.

Sometimes I look benignly on bum-fluffed youths in their modified Micras leaving rubber at the traffic lights before ploughing into lamp-posts. "Poor lambs, they don't know any better. Father forgive them, for they know not what they do," I say to myself, before remembering I'm an atheist who hates boy racers.

Without wishing to sound overly patronising, as is normally my wont, most young drivers are rubbish not because they are inherently bad, but because they haven't been taught how to drive responsibly from the start.

Not to mention the fact that practically all teenagers, male or female, think they're invincible. They reckon that because they got the top score on Grand Theft Auto III on their Playstation that they can suddenly drive a car like pros.

Not so. There's far more to it than knowing which buttons to press in which order. Any fool can change gears smoothly and execute a perfect three-point turn. Sheesh, I can even manage it a lot of the time.

So, rather than spending their transition year learning how to roll joints and forge ID cards, why not have school-goers learning to drive?

And I don't mean plonking a few bored teenagers in front of a road safety video and expecting them to turn into model motorists. I mean real, constructive classes that engage their imaginations while drumming home the message of responsible driving before they ever stick a key in an ignition.

How difficult could it be to organise lessons in basic rules of the road, right of way concepts, recognising road signs, spatial awareness, how to deal with road rage and - perhaps most importantly - the dangers of booze and drugs when you're behind the wheel? And no matter how much it costs, surely it's worth it even if it only stops one wannabe rally driver from smacking into a wall when he does eventually get behind the wheel?

The whole point is to try to indoctrinate the drivers of the future into a culture of safe driving while their minds are pliable, so they'll have it ingrained in their heads to drive carefully because they naturally want to, rather than because they fear retribution.

Everyone wins. Fewer people get killed or injured, insurance premiums go down, more people pass their driving tests first time, the queues shorten, everyone stops moaning about aul' Mr Brennan.