Aah, how things change over the years. When I was a kid, anyone 16 years of age or over could take the test to get a drivers license whether they had any formal training or not. My initial "training" was by an aunt who started letting me drive her car when I was 11.
Then I took drivers education in high school; no cost, the local Ford dealer "loaned" the school a new car for the school year.
In later years our daughters took drivers education in high school. I think I paid $110 for the older one and $135 three years later for the younger one. And drivers education in the school was a joke. I think they put the kids behind the wheel for just a few minutes 3 times each.
So I had to do most of the teaching myself. But our state legislature, in their infinite wisdom, decided that anyone had to take a formal driver training class to get a license under the age of 18. The public schools quit offering driver education, and private companies sprung up to make that money.
Of course, to get a license you don't really have to learn to drive; you only need to have minimal knowledge of the laws, and barely be able to herd the machine down the road.
So the private schools ran the kids through pretty fast, but didn't really teach them very well. As you might expect, they eventually learned that the kids taught by family members were better drivers than those from the formal schools. So Texas came up with the "Parent Taught Drivers Education" program. It can be taught by a parent, grandparent, step-parent, or step-grandparent, as long as the instructor has a good driving record.
You can design your own written lesson plan and get it approved by the Department of Public Safety, or you can use one of their programs, which you can download free of charge from the Internet, or you can buy a printed version for $100. The one I used for my grandson was a total of 1,600 pages (yep, that's not a typo) that included the student's manual, the instructor's manual, tests, forms to document what was taught and when, etc.
Naturally, a person could cheat on the paperwork, but hopefully, most parents want their kid to be well taught and will take the time to do it right. And I can assure you that the program we used was an excellent one; far better than anything I could have written. I thought it was even a good refresher course for the old man.
When it came time for the written test to get the learner's permit, he was asked if he wanted to take the test on paper or on the computer. Naturally, he chose the computer. And he was done so quick I couldn't believe it. It seems that the computer starts asking questions and if the applicant is getting the answers right, it doesn't ask many questions before it just stops and says you passed. They told us he missed one question out of 21, but couldn't even tell us which one it was. Supposedly, if he'd been missing more, it would have kept on asking more questions.
And the DPS has enough confidence in the program that when the applicant goes for his/her license, it's up to the person who taught the course as to whether the applicant even has to take the driving test. I would have liked for my grandson to take the driving test with a DPS officer just for the experience. But I had no doubts about his ability to pass, and the drivers license office was very busy, so I let him skip the driving test.
