CHAPEL HILL - It's encouraging to see the state's Child Fatality Task Force paying attention to driver education in North Carolina, as a recent news story reported. Unlike most other states, North Carolina has continued to support this laudable effort to educate young people about the rules and responsibilities of driving. But let's be clear. This has been about education, not training.

Somewhere along the way from the distant past, when the current structure of driver education was developed, a belief emerged that education about driving would not merely enlighten novices but also turn them into safe drivers. That might once have been possible, when the roadway system was simple and traffic was light. These days, the reasons for teenage drivers' crashes have little to do with what they know about traffic rules and roadway etiquette.

Young drivers' crashes -- to the extent we know the causes -- are largely because they have not yet developed the finely honed, intuitive understanding of the complex interaction between driver, vehicle, roadway, other road users and the larger environment that experienced drivers have mastered through years of experience.

This "learned intuition" allows most driving to occur essentially on autopilot, with drivers taking conscious control only when some subtle cue alerts them that something unusual needs to be consciously addressed.

This is how humans live their lives more generally -- with most decision-making occurring non-consciously. It is the only way we can cope with the incredible complexity of life.

Half a century of research by behavioral scientists has brought us to this understanding. However, researchers are only now beginning to understand this process as it is involved in driving. We are poorly equipped to know just how, or indeed whether, it is possible to train new drivers in a way that will move them more quickly from needing to consciously attend to every aspect of driving -- as the beginner does -- to being able to focus attention mostly on potential threats.

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WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR EFFORTS TO REVAMP DRIVER EDUCATION? First, it's not going to be easy to devise a new approach that delivers on what we all want -- safer young drivers. Second, changes that are not based on a solid understanding of the highly complex human perceptions, judgments and mental processing involved in driving, and in learning to drive, will deliver little if any benefit.

We must be careful not to jump to premature conclusions, enacting "common sense" ideas that fail to incorporate current scientific understanding of human behavior.

More preaching to teens about myriad dangers of driving won't help. We've done that for decades to no benefit.

Forcing some standardized curriculum on instructors before determining what kinds of training, when delivered properly, produce the desired results won't help. That's getting the cart before the horse.

Simply requiring parents to do more, without adequate attention to what -- if done well -- produces safety benefits, won't help.

Merely increasing the time spent driving with an instructor won't help. Evidence from our recent research indicates that it takes from 18 to 30 months, on average, for novices to have sufficiently mastered the cognitively complex task of driving before their level of crash risk even begins to approach that of experienced drivers. The learning that occurs during those first critical years, whatever it involves, simply cannot be compressed into a few hours at the beginning of a teenager's driving career.

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