There has been much discussion on other threads about OW course training standards. Over the years, I have seen many training agencies lower their standards. Although I find this very disappointing, it has been pointed-out that these changes have had little affect on the safety of new divers. The accident rates apparently haven't increased.
There is concern that some Instructors tend to certify divers without insuring that even the minimums have been met. It would seem that some LDS push through their students as a form of revenue generation and try to get them back to "complete their training," by offering Advanced courses.
How do you see the current situation when it comes to diver OW certification?
The same thing goes for Instructor standards, many Agencies have decreased these standards over the years. How would increased standards for Instructor certification affect the industry?
First off, I don't think accident rates are necessarily the best metric ... because although it's incontrovertible that standards have lowered over the years, modern equipment has also made scuba diving a much more "forgiving' activity.
But what about damage to dive sites, tightening regulations on scuba activity, and an overall "nanny" mentality that is becoming more pervasive every passing year? Are those really desireable? Why are they like that? Is it an indication that, perhaps, we're trying to address an overall lack of skills with other, offsetting remedies? I think so.
Basically what's happened with dive instruction is that it's become "modularized" ... what used to be covered in one class is now covered in three or four. But there's no requirement (and in some cases little incentive) to take anything beyond the entry level class ... and in most cases, that class simply doesn't provide enough skills and information to allow a diver to be independent of supervision. So the majority of divers are really only getting a tiny portion of the training that they were once offered in a more encompassing class.
I think that having agencies promote scuba training is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it offers the advantages of standardization ... at least to a degree. On the other hand, you now have to balance the need for quality against the need for turning a profit ... and the motivation in any company is to reduce costs in order to increase profits. In the case of scuba training, reducing costs means offering less or finding more efficient ways to present the same. There's a bit of both going on ... with its own set of advantages and disadvantages.
The incentive to sell classes has had another side-effect ... instructors who are well-versed in agency requirements, but with little real-world context in which to apply them. This has the effect of producing "checklist" training, where the student is required only to perform the skills (usually while kneeling on the bottom or on a platform) without any real degree of proficiency, and with little or no opportunity to apply the skill in a real-world diving situation. That tends to produce divers who are insecure and dependent ... in other words, your basic dog-paddling, bicycling, vertically-oriented Cozumel vacation diver ... the sort that has to kneel on the bottom in order to take a compass reading or clear a mask, and relies on a divemaster to plan and lead their dives and take care of any problems that may occur while they are diving. And although some of these divers will not improve substantially over their entire diving lifetimes, the vast majority also won't ever experience anything remotely like a life-threatening incident ... most vacation diving is in very forgiving environments. However, there are no statistics on how many of these people end up with ear or other minor barotrauma problems or suffer minor DCS hits that would have never occurred if they had better training and technique.
The REAL issue ... with both instructors and divers in general ... is that we tend to view ourselves as more skilled than we actually are. And as long as the dive goes according to plan, we never really have an opportunity to test our self-image ... because diving is extremely simple and safe when everything goes right. It's when things don't go according to plan ... things like stress, a leaking mask or a free-flowing regulator leads to poor decisions ... that we suddenly realize that our training didn't really prepare us as well as we thought it did. This is where most accidents occur ... and unfortunately, most I've been able to get reliable information about appeared to have been completely preventable with appropriate training and skills ... and the context to make good decisions. But again, those instances are rare, in comparison to the total number of dives done each year.
Perhaps a better metric would be to investigate the reasons why so many divers tend to drop out of the activity shortly after receiving their initial OW training. Is it ... as one CD once told me ... because they learned just enough to scare the crap outta themselves? I tend to think that might be a plausible explanation ...
... Bob (Grateful Diver)
