We do as related to the left wing decisions that have been made to shore up our financial system, or rather the players. I don't think there is a mixed economy in the diving industry but maybe you can enlighten me.
e.g., MAP is neither left wing nor free market.
If people have inadequate information there must be a reason for it. However, people have more common sense than you give them credit for. They overwhelmingly decide to head for a LDS that offers them a training program that trains about a million divers a year. I think the point you are trying to make is that they may have other choices. However if the other agencies don't make themselves be known, you can hardly blame the market leader. I am working as an independent now. So my students come to me because they trust me and then they want a recognised qualification that they can travel with. If I said fine, I can train you but the cert card is going to be the Inter Galatic Divers on Mars card or something else they had never heard of they would seek training elsewhere. Most new divers also do some research before signing up for a program. I think what annoys you is that many people have those resources as far as learning to dive is concerned and still decide to go with the market leader. Again, you can't blame that agency for the shortcomings of the others in getting their message out there. Frankly, I would welcome a more competitive environment which would do us all a better service.
Your observations do not jibe with mine. I'd say that students don't make a choice of agency or even program, in most cases they have no idea that there is an actual choice to make. They go to the closest shop and sign up, or the operator at the resort, in the rare case where there is an actual choice of vendors, "what agency?" is a question that is almost never asked, they want assurance that their certification will be recognized when they travel, but that's about it. When a rare student does ask questions about agency differences, all the get from the PADI shops is the half-truth that so easily hides incompetence, "it's the instructor not the agency," which recognizes only the within agency variability and the quality at the bottom of an agency's teaching cadre, but not the difference between agency means or (even more telling) at the upper end of the instructional programs.
TRUE. So as I have been saying all along, if people walk into the first place and find a given agency, it's clear to me that the others have a distribution problem, in other words they don't have enough points of sale. As I said before, I would rather be talking to would-be students about the merits of training with Agency A vs. B vs C vs D than having the actual situation where we are all offering what appears to be the same program (the instructor and the facility makes the difference) and people saying "yeah but I can get it for $25 or $50 less down the street".
There is no question that PADI has done the best possible job of marketing, they did such a good job that they are a virtual monopoly, but the way in which they did that reveals more about their underlying philosophy ... cut standards and inflate titles. Now that maybe good marketing, but that's all it is.
I understand where you are coming from and I agree with you that calling people with 10 logged dives AOW or 50 logged dives Master Scuba Divers is "course title inflation". However, what seems easy for those of us who live and work inside the business requires time, dedication and a considerable financial effort on the part of our students. Course title inflation is practised by the majority of agencies. Why? Because it works and makes people keep diving which we all agree is a good thing. Unfortunately, this doesn't only exist in our industry. Nowadays everyone you meet is a Senior Vice President. A baggage handler at an airport is a "Customer Service Auxiliary Equipment Officer".
PADI started this trend, which I will grant you has spread. Just because others have adopted it doesn't make it right, it just shows how effective it is with an uninformed public.
I am an advocate for a recreational, non professional qualification beyond MSD where students would have the knowledge and skills of a certified DM leaving out the parts of assisting the instructor.
I have special feelings about this. I introduced the concept of Master Diver to the recreational world when I revised all of NAUI's Standards back in the 1980s. MSD was a rating that was designed to be all the elements of the NAUI Instructor program without the teaching theory, group control, and internal NAUI bumph. A NAUI MSD was the equal (as a diver) of any NAUI Leadership rank. In fact a NAUI MSD could become an instructor by taking a greatly abbreviated program that dealt with just those items, since there was no need for diving skill and knowledge instruction or testing. IT was a way to try and stablilize a system that would first produce truly expert divers and then permit those that had qualified as experts, who had the interest, to move on to various leadership roles. This contrasts with the current system that makes instructors out out people who really don't have suffcient diving experience to take on that role, but are willing to work for fast-food wages.
Some 30 people of all nationalities were killed in the Alps last winter. In France last year, according to official government statistics, 12 people died on piste and 10 off piste, and doctors treated 140,000 injuries. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says that about 10,000 British skiers and snowboarders visit hospitals on their return from holiday with injuries ranging from concussion and broken bones to torn ligaments. Data from the United States showed that 22 skiers and snowboarders died last year.Of course, injuries do occur. The less experienced you are as a skier or snowboarder, the more likely you are to hurt yourself. Thanks to better piste preparation and safety barriers, injuries resulting from collisions with static pylons and trees have fallen. However, collisions with other skiers and snowboarders have increased sharply and now account for 10 per cent of all injuries. Most vulnerable are those aged under 11 and over 55. (Source: Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents)
The question was not if people were hurt or killed while skiing, the question was how many brand new skiiers where killed or injured.
That's very good. Not everybody wants to spend 100 hours to find out if they want to Scuba dive, that's why there are shorter, modular programs that advocate that people then go on to do additional training.
I'm not advocating 100 hours for everyone. An effective course can be taught in about 40 hours.
Not at all? About what?
I believe the opposite. We'd go back to the pre 1980s and have very few divers doing quasimilitary diving programs. There wouldn't be an industry for the instructors, the LDS, the tour operators and the equipment manufacturers.
This is a red herring. Such programs were few and far between and did not exist prior to PADI. Open Circuit training was invented by the science community in the early 1950s. We taught it to the Navy and the recreational community. It was not until PADI starting giving Instructor cards to anyone with a $10 bill who could write a letter claiming they had performed scuba training that such procedures appeared in the recreational community. Where did it show up? Amongst PADI Instructors, of course. People who had mustered out of the service and then sent their $10 to PADI with a note that they had trained divers in the service. But even so, it was pretty rate, but now PADI Instructors (forgetting, or not knowing, their own origins) keep harping on that as one of the big changes ... it's such B.S.
I don't doubt what you say. How many students do you certify per year?
I used to train about forty entry level divers, twenty Master Divers, twenty AIs, twenty DMs and ten Instructors per year. Now I only train about ten divers a year, based on either past associations or travel that I'm interested in making.
Some of those critical skills are never taught in future classes.
Any diver who does not sign up for additional programs does not get trained in those critical skills unless they latch onto a really good mentor.
That attitude has always been rare. The concept that prior to PADI lowering it's standards most classes included 5 mile runs with full gear, weapons training and Ž¼ mile swims is a myth.
But it's a myth that keeps getting repeated and repeated by people who where not there and have no idea of what was actually going on, it's become a justification and a false one at that. It's recreational diving at it's usual "best," a solution in search of a problem.
The comprehensive approach to dive training is actually easier.
Of course it is.
You've either not looked at the PADI Advanced Plus course or you don't know what's involved in the NAUI Master Diver course. Advanced Plus was a pretty good advanced class, but it was only 9 dives along with some academics. It was better than any of the AOW classes, but not up to YMCA Silver Advanced standards and far short of both NAUI's Master Diver or YMCA's Gold Master Diver.
You are quite correct. You'd think that anyone who wants to see a certain kind of program would be familiar with existing programs that are exactly what they are asking for.
I didn't read the whole thread above so maybe you already had some comments from people who got trained under the current PADI system.
I had open water in July 2008
Did a couple boat charter dive with insta-buddies
Did Advanced open water in October and a couple more fun dives
More fun dives on the schedule as soon as I can do them
Observations about my instructors/classes
1 - Not everyone passes the first time - granted most do -- 99%+ but....
The instructors will and have asked people who had problems to come back to the next open water sessions to do the skills again. They did have a few extra instructors at the site for our class and did some one on one lessons with a person having problems with the skills.
That's all very nice, but rather irrelevant to the topics at hand.
2 - They STRESSED the very important rules of scuba
Don't hold your breath ever -- Be very aware of your air and depth -- Safety stops -- ascending at the correct rate -- Equalizing your ears often and don't force your dive if they hurt.
Do you think that's all the important things that need to be learned about diving? Just one example: Safety Stops, given a 30 FPM ascent rate, are irrelvent. But PADI's tables have a 60 FPM ascent rate built into them, thus making safety stops of some utility. Did you know that? Did you know that the ascent rate is a integral part of the decompression model and can be changed as long as the tables are changed to deal with the new ascent rate?
3 - They made people do the skills right - over and over and over until it was perfect.
Did you perform a minimum of 17 practice sessions for sharing air? Did you know that according to research done at UCLA that is what's required to have 95% confidence that you will be able to successfully perform air sharing in a non-emergency situation?
Now are all the students from the basic open water class ready to take on advanced dives with challenging circumstances? Nope, but I do feel the instructors did a good job giving the students the skills and information they need to begin to be divers.
With all due respect, do you really think that you have the background to make that judgment? I would suggest that students from a basic open water class have the ability to dive with leadership personnel, because they are completely unprepared for the myriad of things that can (and will) go wrong.
The instructors were all positive and made the whole experience fun and exciting. I think that works a lot better then adding stress to people by making it a military exercise.
The quasi-military training thing is a bogeyman that many instructors hide behind. It's the classic bad-mouthing of a product that they are not able to provide. Neither I, nor Walter, are suggesting making anything into a military exercise. I've been teaching diving for more than thirty years now and I have never once asked a diver to do a single push up, I have never asked a diver to run any distance, I never engaged in a single act of harassment.
