mstroeck:
Sorry if this has already come up somewhere in this monster of a thread, but there's one thing that really get's me thinking about the training aspiring divers typically receive:
There's close to no repition of the basic truths and skills that every diver should know/master.
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Of the 12 people I did OW with, ONE read the entire book. Judging from a very informal survey among my diving buddies, very few people ever read all the material.
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Virtually nothing is hammered home as much as it should be in OW classes.
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I got my cert at a school here in Austria where people genuinely care about their students,
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Why in the world is it like that. All instructors have to do is say the few really important things over and over and over, that can be done while people are donning their gear, during breaks, when floating on the surface for some time... It's EASY to make most courses better
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Excuse me for being so blunt, but seeing as you did not get repetition and did not get the training you feel is necessary, and that you feel that doing it the correct way is easy, how can you say that your scool in Austria "genuinely care about their students"? It sounds, to me, like they were adhering to minimum standards, and that their expectation of "mastery" was somewhat along the lines of "just able to do it once".
In my opinion, there's nothing in the PADI standards which prevents me as an instructor from giving a good OW course and training divers exhaustively.
What may prevent good diver training is bad instructors, though. And one may blame the standards for allowing bad instructors, but I haven't seen anyone propose a really usefull way of "disallowing" bad instructors...
Because that is not done, after OW most people are simply scared to death of some things that are outside of the scope of their training:
* free-flowing regulators
* decompression obligations
* diving without a DM
* diving without a computer
* diving from a boat
* shooting to the surface in an uncontrolled manner, like many still do on their last certification dive...
* loosing their buddy
* the need to do a controlled ascent whil air-sharing
* getting eaten by sharks ;-)
* ... and many other things ...
When one of those things occurs and everything you heard about that was of the negative "hope that never happens" or "this normally doesn't happen" variety, panic is the natural reaction for most people.
So is the certification-system broken? In that respect, certainly. People are coming out of OW afraid of and underinformed about certain aspects for three reasons:
1) They weren't tought the right attitude.
2) They didn't get all the information they need.
3) They didn't get the opportunitiy to hone their skills enough.
I have the impression that more and more people are fundamentally afraid of diving, but continue that way in the false sense of security that arises from the industries "anyone can do it"-attitude.
Most of that is, in my opinion, a question of the instructor not doing his job as he should. The PADI standards could require more and the PADI training materials could be more in depth. But as you yourself observe, your fellow OW-students didn't for the most part even read the materials in their current form -- do you think that they would have listened to an instructor give longer lectures, read through a book twice as thick with more theory etc?
I always state up front, that I do not teach people the fast-track to their OW cert, but I teach them to dive. We go over the theory (I can assure you that they read the book...) until they know what they need to know. It takes more than the minimum number of pool-sessions, more than the minimum number of ow-sessions, includes a few "experience dives" with no skills, but where I will follow and supervise a buddy pair who otherwise are left to their own devices when planning and executing a dive using tables and depth-gagues and computers. I do all this well within the PADI system. I tell people up front that if they want a fast c-card, go the dive-shop down the road and do it over a weekend -- I won't do it that way.
It does help for me that diving is not my main profession, so my livelyhood does not depend on having a steady flow of students.
Idealistically I would love to be able to teach an OW-course, with the theory from the RD and DM book: basic deco-models, how to deal with emergencies etc. I would also like to include some "light deco procedures" in the course such that people -- as you say -- are not afraid of "deco", know that they should stay within the no-stop limits but also know how to deal with deco, should they enter into it. Realistically, though, very few new divers would be able to accomodate that much information in one bulk, and I do agree with the idea of splitting things up. But nothing prevents me from teaching OW students to hold a rock-solid deco stop -- we just call it a safety stop.
If I was to change one thing in the PADI system, it would be to have a level (somewhere) with the watermanskills and the dive theory from the DM course, but without the "liability" part of leading and supervising divers. People keep telling me that NAUI has such a course -- if I ever come around a NAUI instructor, I'll pick his brain carefully on that topic....
