The following appeared in a letter to the school board in the town of Centerville."All students should be required to take the driver's education course at Centerville High School. In the past two years, several accidents in and around Centerville have in

The author of the letter avers that all students should be forced to take driver's education course at Centerville High School. Supposedly this step will ensure that these adolescents are safe drivers. This conclusion is buttressed by evidence which should be carefully scrutinized in order to give a comprehensive estimation of soundness of the argument.

The first evidence which is given to us is that in the past couple of years several accidents, which happened in and near the town, have involved young drivers. However, were these crashes caused by these teenagers? Probably they are blameless and the violation of traffic rules by the second driver is the real reason of the crashes. Moreover, other unstated factors may contribute to these accidents for instance, bad road or weather conditions such as icy or wet road's surface, thick smog and other reasons may implicitly lead to the accidents. Thus author's belief that insufficient driver's skills of these teenagers caused these crashes is dubious.

The second evidence is that some parents of students who study at Centerville High School are too busy to devote their time to teach their offspring to drive and other parents are too poor to allow their progeny to attend driving school. But perhaps, these two groups do not intersect with each other. Probably, busy parents may send their children to a local professional driving school and these adults who are on a tight budget may teach their adolescents by themselves.

Finally, the arguer claims that effective and mandatory school program is the only way to combat the problem; however, it is doubtful that the school program may be as effective as driving school with professional instructors. Moreover, the compulsory course seems to be questionable idea as well. Perhaps some teenager simple have no desire to acquire drive license or they have some graver question to worry about such as final tests and successful finishing of high school. What is more, is this school course the only option for these teenagers? Probably other ways may be found, for example, the local government may allocate money for the program and the children will be able to take professional lessons. Therefore, the proposed idea seems to be unwarranted.

In conclusion, the argument states that in order to assure that school teenagers are safe drivers, these should be forced to take a school driving program; however, there is no solid evidence that these young drivers have insufficient driver's skills and that proposed program may guarantee the expected result. Thus the argument is unwarranted.