MikeFerrara:
ClayJar:
Our materials stressed that a certification was "a license to learn more".
You don't need a license to learn and a scuba certification isn't a license of any kind.
Don't get all wrapped up in semantics. I understand what you're saying about the value of cards, but if that's all you took from my wary posting to this thread, you do me an unfortunate disservice.
That phrase was a partial quote from page six of the NAUI Scuba Diver book (more or less equivalent to PADI OW). The full paragraph, which is highlighted in blue and which accounts for a line in the workbook is as follows:
NAUI Scuba Diver student book (copyright 2004) page 6:
Your NAUI Scuba Diver Certification card is just the beginning of your adventures in diving. It is your license to learn more about the underwater world. There is no one who knows everything there is to know about diving, but in diving, you'll find much of the fun is in the learning.
Is it a literal license? Of course not! As you say, it is merely a commonly accepted formality used to simplistically determine to whom to grant access to various diving-related things without further consideration, which is certainly not utopia.
Their point was to emphasize that while in the world we live a card is required to have access to the means of learning more, it is only the beginning; even the best diver has more to learn. It seems the only difference between them and you is that you would simply skip the part where you get a card saying you know the very basics. I suppose I can understand how that card could be seen as a negative incentive for further learning among some, but I can certainly identify with the emotional boost it gives a new diver. (Now, the "vanity cards" that AOW and "specialties" often amount to... those can go the way of the dodo. PADI MSD is unequivocally a vanity card; NAUI MSD, on the other hand, was nothing to laugh at, although the naming seems rather pretentious.)
Anyway, regardless of the whole to C or not to C considerations, *my* whole point was that rather than going to town on the poorly-qualified results of McDiver training, wouldn't it be a better idea if we decided that we would each step up to the plate and help other divers improve? Complaining to the agency isn't going to get anywhere. Filling in the holes in divers' educations so they, in turn, can assist other divers and so on, each one voicing their displeasure at their inadequate training? That might eventually get somewhere, but even if it doesn't, it'll help *those* divers.
Frankly, I'm a pragmatist. I do my part to positively influence those around me, be they instructors, shops, agencies, or whatever, but I don't get caught up in it. I probably can't effect change in an agency, but I can work with my diving friends on improving their diving (which, by all accounts, has made their diving more fun), and I can work on trying to build momentum amongst those at my LDS for more "cheap fun" dives, be they springs or pools or whatever, so that more divers can be exposed to better diving.
In my limited experience, the divers who were having the most fun have been the divers with the most diving skill, and that was apparent to everyone, even the unskilled divers around them -- perhaps *especially* to the unskilled divers around them. If it wasn't such a chore, who *wouldn't* want to improve their diving so they could have more fun? I am of the belief that improving your diving skill *ISN'T* a chore -- it's only the Card Of The Month concept that makes it such. If divers had some ready way to improve their skill (so their diving would be more fun) *and* have fun doing it... well, I don't think I needed an engineering background to do *that* math.
I suppose, then, that I must apparently be campaigning for more evangelization of the joy of diving well, and more effort into providing less-skilled divers with the means to better themselves outside the confines of the class-and-card system. Instead of trying to overthrow the system, why not just point out the useless bits by making them completely irrelevant, as many of them have become to me? (I actually had a shop tell me not to bother with a class because I'd already learned everything it would teach me. That ought universally to be the case with some "specialties".)
Well... I guess it was a decent Monday rant... "And now, back to your regularly scheduled thread."