The late John Campbell, editor of Analog Science Fact and Fiction, was a font of provocative ideas. One was to legalize drugs. His idea was that kids are evolving away from listening to their parents. In earlier days, a kid who ignored parental advice was not likely to survive the day. “Who says I can’t go look at the sabre-tooth tiger!”

With easily available hard drugs, we have the parents and the adult world in general advising against them. Thus separating the listeners from the non-listeners before the latter have time to breed.

Campbell’s idea, and the judge’s observation both address that some people are incapable of learning, to their and our detriment. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

The drama sounds fine. However actually letting kids think that someone has died is just cruel.

Every 15 minutes throughout the school day, a heartbeat comes on the intercom and then goes to flatline. A pre-selected student is summoned out of class by “the grim reaper,” their face is painted white, and they are not allowed to talk to anyone else for the rest of the school day. That night, the students are taken off-site to a location unknown by their family and are counseled and talk about what it would be like to be one of those kids who was actually killed by a drunk driver. They even write mock “last words” to their families. My daughter was one of those kids, and she found it to be a very emotional but effective night.

The next day there is a school assembly (all juniors and seniors only) where the students who were taken off campus come back and share what they learned. A couple of guest speakers are brought in who have first hand experience about losing a loved one to a drunk driver. It is a very emotionally taxing, but effective program. I participated as a teacher and a parent. I know it made a difference for my daughter, and for many of my students as well. This program can be done right and done effectively. We aren’t lying to our kids – we are showing them a controlled reality.

There isn’t any real trickery involved; it’s just theater. Death figures come and get the kids out of class; I think maybe make up is applied, and then later in the day there’s a staged car wreck somewhere on campus and an assembly.

It triggers much more “what if” kind of thinking, rather than an actual belief that anyone has died.

Kids like drama, so they like it. I don’t know if it makes them any less likely to drive drunk or get in cars with drunk drivers.

That officer was full of it. The earliest year I could find data for was 1966:
50,894 fatalities
196,560,000 US population
25.89/100,000 fatality rate

One year odds is the reciprocal: 196,560,000/50,894=3862.14, or about 1 chance in 3862 of dying in a car accident each year.

To find lifetime odds, you divide the one year odds by life expectancy- which was approximately 70 in 1966: 3862/70=55.18. So in 1966 the lifetime odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident was about 1 in 55.
That compares to a lifetime odds of 1 in 84 for the year 2004.

I’m referring to the “simple statistic” B.G. above heard in his class in the 1960s — “that 1/3 of the people in the class would be killed in a car accident.”

For forty years now, he’s remembered it, it has been made even more powerful by his personal experience, and undoubtably it has made him a safer driver. Yet it’s utterly false!

Admittedly, I’m working on modern statistics,
see: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

and cars are a lot safer now than they were in the 1960s. But currently (1994-2006 stats), about 40 to 43 thousand people die (quite consistently) each year in automobile accidents, something less than 15 per 100,000 people. Even over a lifetime — even over 100 years — the chance of a single person dying when exposed to an annual 0.015%
chance of being in a fatal accident — is less than 2%. It’s too high, for sure — but nowhere near one in three.

We could increase a little by only looking at registered drivers — everyone in that class was presumably on their way to becoming a driver — but the annual figure there is 22 per 100,000, not the enormous increase you’d need to justify this figure (and my crude use of 100 years of exposure is even more of an overestimate).

If you are honest with your children, let them actually experience the consequences of their actions growing up, and give them as much actual responsibility as they can handle, you’re likely to get great adults. Though not every kid turns out great even with the best parenting and we also need to recognize that kids have free will.

I recall a visit that a police officer made to our driver training class. This was in mid-60′s. He cited a simple statistic; i.e., that 1/3 of the people in the class would be killed in a car accident. That could mean one of the two people sitting to either side of you, or it could mean you I know all of you are thinking ‘It doesn’t mean me’. ”

This stuck with me for many years. Particularly when as I grew older I learned of friends who had been killed in auto accidents.