I"m in this for the love of diving, not for an extra thing to do on vacation - I think that is the difference between those who take it seriously and those who don't.
There's a lot to be said for that. I'm finding it increasingly tedious to read posts from the instructors on this board who are constantly slamming the "state of training" in scuba diving, and promoting themselves as the greatest instructor since Cousteau invented the regulator. Their views tend to be skewed by the self-selecting nature of the students they teach.
As an independent instructor, I see this first-hand. The level of students I get today are a far higher quality, generally-speaking, than those I used to get when I taught for a dive shop. The reason is because (a) they are motivated to seek out an instructor that provides a level of quality that suits their needs rather than simply looking for the cheapest, fastest or easiest path to a C-card, and (b) they are willing to pay a premium price for a premium product. Scuba instruction is like everything else in life ... you tend to get what you pay for. And in this case that refers to both the financial investment and the investment in effort required of the student. And the process of learning scuba diving is as much about the motivation and effort of the student as it is the motivation and effort of the instructor. So those of us who cater to motivated students will generally turn out better divers.
But that has at least as much to do with the quality of the students we attract as with the quality of the course we offer. It takes both to turn out a good diver.
Agencies offer shortened, dumbed-down courses for a reason ... because there's a lot of people out there who want to buy them. The majority of people who learn to scuba dive will never be interested in doing anything like diving in rigorous conditions ... or even diving somewhere where they don't have a guide or DM to plan their dive for them. It doesn't occur to these people that they would need rescue skills because, to their mind, that's what they're paying the DM for.
Right or wrong ... that's the reality of where we are in diving today. And the only way you're ever going to change that is to exclude those people from diving. I get the sense that's exactly what Thal is proposing ... and in an unregulated market, it's an unrealistic expectation, because as long as there's a demand for a product there will always be someone willing to sell it.
The biggest problem I see is that when you hand somebody an OW card, there's no way of knowing what kind of instruction they received ... to use Thal's analogy, you can't tell whether you're looking at a BMW or a Yugo.
I long ago decided that I don't want to offer my students the Yugo. I can't claim to offer them the BMW either ... probably more in the Toyota or Subaru range. But for where I dive, I try to offer them sufficient training to be able to dive here with some level of self-sufficiency coming out of their initial training. Frankly, I think most instructors want to do that ... regardless of the agency they teach for. No instructor wants to wake up some morning and read about a former student of theirs dying from doing something stupid. But as Lynne and others have alluded, there will always be a percentage of people out there who will do something stupid, no matter what level of training they received, or how many people told them not to do it.
Some people just insist on learning things the hard way ... and nothing anybody can do will ever change that. It's human nature ... and there ain't a scuba instructor on the planet who can change human nature, no matter how much he insists that he can.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)