Serious question about PADI

[TCDiver1]

When PADI became for profit, they applied all the market research tools other companies use, and they found that the only way for the percentage of the population that dives to increase significantly is to make it quicker and easier to get into diving. They found that consumers want immediate gratification with little or no effort.
In other words, if you could get a certification card from a vending machine, almost everyone would dive, and if you had to go through Navy SEAL training to dive, very few people would do so.

In response to this information, they shortened the course, removed content, and also removed information that might intimidate potential divers. People will rant and argue about this, but it is objective fact that you can now get OW certified in one weekend, when it once took months, that clearly identifiable skills like buddy breathing were once required and now are not, and that several dangerous types of barotrauma are euphemistically lumped into the less threatening sounding phrase "lung overexpansion injury." As a result of these changes, the number of divers grew dramatically. Dive related businesses flourished, and, of course, PADI raked in a whole lotta dough. All good, right?

I'm curious dweeb, what qualifies you to make statements like this? You have nothing filled out in your profile is why i ask.

No standards that i'm aware of will allow getting an OW cert in one weekend. It can not be done while still meeting minimum standards. Instructors or LDSs that are doing an entire OW course in one weekend, are not meeting any minumum standards i am aware of.

Even if standards did allow doing that many CW & OW dives in two days, it is not possible to get through all the required skills for any but the smallest classes. And that would assume no major student problems along the way, which rarely happens by the way.

On another note, i did PADI BOW class over 25 years ago and did not have to perform all the skills that are required today. We were however task loaded with problems much, much worse than today. Things like getting your mask or fins ripped off, getting your air turned off, getting your regulator ripped out, buddy breathing, ditch and don, etc. Not really hard until they started hitting you with combinations of the above.

All we knew about trim back then was if you were fat, you weren't trim. Buoyancy control was going down when you wanted to and going up when you wanted to. Gas management was not running out of air at depth. Proper ascent rate was ascending no faster than your smallest bubbles (now generally known to be faster than the max recommended 60 FPM.)

OW class back then was better in some ways and worse in others IMO. The fantasy of how great yesterdays training was in comparison to todays is exactly that ..... a fantasy.

 

[dweeb]

That's neither fair, nor true. Most agencies (PADI & others) defined "recreational" limits to apply to what was taught in their courses, which included depth and non-overhead (hard or soft) requirements.

Not so. There was a time when PADI allowed hard overhead environments in AOW, and decompression was covered in OW.
(Actually, it still is - the RDP just euphemizes decompression stops as "mandatory safety stops.")
I remember when the term "technical diving" started
appearing. The important point is that when it comes to
things like the value of being prepared to handle a crisis without panicking, there is no difference between tech and rec. When it comes to the benefits of being horizontal and neutral, even when task loaded, there is no real difference.
If you look at what DIR preaches versus the reality of how
most PADI OW courses are conducted (students knealing on the bottom for everything except specific hovering drills, where ALL their concentration is on buoyancy) there is no reason that the differences are more applicable to tech diving. It's like telling someone, "it's OK if you never look in the rearview mirror because you're not driving in the Indy 500." Whether or not the DIR practices are more optimal than someone else's is a valid discussion, but the idea that optimal practice doesn't matter because you're just "recreational" is ridiculous.

 

[dweeb]

I think there is a positive though...with a broader market, with a broader net...the diving industry can help in teaching to protect the environment, to learn about the oceans etc. At least this is the ideal.

That's a HUGE fallacy. The National Park system was supposed to achieve that, and soon, the roads into Yellowstone became clogged with huge, gas guzzling SUV's.
Invite the mainstream public into an unspoiled wilderness, and they'll just demand that you put a McDonald's drive thu there. Broadening access to nature's beauty just encourages people to treat it like something that is there for them to use and dispose of, because you bring in shallow people who never think beyond the here and now.
The only people who see such things and care enough about preserving them to actually make sacrifices are the people who are willing to sacrifice time and effort to get to see them in the first place. Preserving the environment is the ultimate exercise in deferred gratification, because, if you're lucky, your grandchildren might live long enough to see the incremental benefit from the sacrifices/efforts/inconveniences you endure today. Turning access to the beauty of nature into yet another immediate gratification fest only brings in more of the people who never learned to defer gratification, and who will thus simply shortsightedly trample what is laid before them. The idea that making entry into diving easier will preserver reefs is just casting pearls before swine.
That's what brought the type of people to Cozumel who said, "Gee, this would be better if there was a huge pier for massive cruise ships full of drunken refugees from the Jerry Springer show."

 

[zboss]

That's a HUGE fallacy. The National Park system was supposed to achieve that, and soon, the roads into Yellowstone became clogged with huge, gas guzzling SUV's...

No-one can say that receiving an education of sorts on a sport that derives it's enjoyment from the environment (which one gets at any level of diving) will not improve the chances of presevring the environment.

On the other hand... I do see that many of the local companies that provide services to foriegn dive operations don't give a rats ass about preserving the environment. For example: I keep a boat in the Caribbean and I feel I am pretty sensitive to the environment but as soon as I drop my boat off to get some work done on the engine you can be pretty sure that all that gas and oil left over from the work gets washed right off my boat and into the water by the repair guy. A lot of destruction of the environment is incidental... I have confidence in most people that if they are educated they will do what they can to avoid damaging nature.

You ARE right about yellowstone...

 

[dweeb]

They see scuba as education by ordeal leading to entrance into a select group. Mike is a good example. They believe in train, train, train. Fun is secondary to training.
They don't like PADI because it stresses having fun scuba diving, rather than making it hard, exacting work.

My OW class was a full semester, 5 hours a week. We did buddy breathing tank exchanges without a mask, and bailouts.
The academic material left me able to take the DM exam two years later without any additional study. Was it an ordeal?
Hardly. It was the most fun I could have with my clothes on. It was a blast; the highlight of every week. Same for everyone else in the class. I've also seen 100's of people from 12 to 80, real NASA rocket scientists to janitors, go through the same course grinning like Cheshire cats.

What we are against is learned helplessness, and a sense of dependency, not fun.

 

[zboss]

That's what brought the type of people to Cozumel who said, "Gee, this would be better if there was a huge pier for massive cruise ships full of drunken refugees from the Jerry Springer show."

The worst boats are the SMALL cruiseships that can pull into previously unused bays and such. For example - Wind Jammer. While I believe that the company in general and the executive crews attempt to do what they can to avoid the Drunken Refugees... none-the-less that's why the cruises come here...

These cruises come into clean pristine white sand beaches and drop off several hundred people in long boats. Often they drop these people of the beach, regardless of the ground seas, grinding up the beach and destroying my mooring balls. I have seen a few almost flip over with 50 people in them. Then they drop off grills, cooks, bartenders, etc... the worst is when they do Tennis Ball bingo...

After all the families are on the beach, dropping their trash all over the place since the cruise didn't bother to bring any trash cans with them, a helicopter comes with a giant net filled with Tennis Balls with letters and numbers on them. You can imagine what happens next. Anyhow... after they leave my family and I are left with the task of cleaning up the beach. I bet we pull off a large garbage bag with each visit (2 times a week at low season).

We have complained to the captain and company but they never respond, or if they do it's "the beach is public property we can do what we want".

So yes - crowds DO cause environmental destruction. However, the one thing I have learned is that progress never stops and the people keep coming and coming and coming.

 

[gj62]

There was a time...

Fine - there was. That covers darn near everything. Let's talk about today. Rec vs Tek is valid. Some skills overlap, but the required mastery of those skills is very different.

That's a HUGE fallacy. The National Park system was supposed to achieve that, and soon, the roads into Yellowstone became clogged with huge, gas guzzling SUV's.
Invite the mainstream public into an unspoiled wilderness, and they'll just demand that you put a McDonald's drive thu there.

You're deluded. Without the NPS, there would have been no mechanism to have even a modicum of moderated growth or limited development in those areas. If we relied upon private landholders (as was the case prior to the NPS) to preserve these areas, that land would have eventually fallen to private commercial concerns, and rather than a McDonald's at the entrance, you'd have 500 Motel6's scattered willy-nilly throughout the park.

Realize, commercialism will drive the development of areas people want to go. Is that bad? Unchecked, of course. Is the NPS the ideal solution - not hardly. Looking back at the politics of the day and the method by which lands have been admitted into that system, you'd be hard pressed to get a substantially better plan through the people.

 

[dweeb]

You're picking some pretty questionable examples as a critique. Buddy breathing has been dropped because it's simply not a good way to share air. Too easy to hold your breath, too easy for a panicked diver to start fighting over a regulator, too easy to drop the reg passing it back & forth. You can drill everyone like crazy to master this skill, but it's still risky and is a poor substitute for just having an alternate 2nd stage.

1. There are still places where alternate 2nd stages are not universal. It's better to know it and not need it than to need it and not know it.

2. It has value as a task loading exercise. If you can buddy breathe, THAT proves mastery of all the component skills involved (which PADI still teaches, but allows the student to perform in isolation under idealized conditions, proving nothing about mastery.)

And what's wrong with lumping several types of barotrauma together into "lung overexpansion injury"? Any competent instructor is going to communicate the point that this is a bad thing. The specific differences between the different types of injury are hardly relevant to a recreational diver in terms of treating them. It's a good area to expand your knowledge as a diver, but realistically unless you're a medical professional, it isn't going to affect your treatment approach.

There are slight differences in optimal first aid treatment, and, if nothing else, someone who experiences a subcutaneous emphysema, will be a lot better off knowing they are not going to die.

Now that I'll have veins in your forehead throbbing,

Heh, I couldn't be smiling wider. Stereotypes will only get you in trouble.

let me say that I agree with a lot of the DIR approach. My job as an engineer deals with design verification & reliability - you could say that I'm professionally paranoid. I believe in training constantly, always looking to do things better, and in creating a solid safety margin. However, the flip side is simplification - what value are you adding in terms of some of these skills or knowledge?

Simple - overlearning. If you can grit your teeth and manage to clear your mask while knealing on the bottom, after the instructor asks you if you're REALLY, REALLY ready, that proves nothing. However, it's very likely that your mask may flood while buddy breathing, and if you can take that in stride, that means you're really OK with it flooding, and if, as I've seen students do, you clear that mask during that exercise, it's a safe bet there are almost no circumstances you'll encounter where you won't be able to do it, i.e. you've overlearned the skill to where it's second nature. PADI teaches people to walk, and they teach them to chew gum, but it specifically forbids the instructor from conditioning certification on the student demonstrating that they can walk and chew gum at the same time. (For the allegorically challenged, substitute any two dive skills, such as clear mask and maintain neutral buoyancy, for walking and chewing gum.)

 

[dweeb]

I'm curious dweeb, what qualifies you to make statements like this? You have nothing filled out in your profile is why i ask. No standards that i'm aware of will allow getting an OW cert in one weekend. It can not be done while still meeting minimum standards. Instructors or LDSs that are doing an entire OW course in one weekend, are not meeting any minumum standards i am aware of.

Well, then you need to adjust your awareness. Specifically, if you're a PADI member, and you attended the 2003 member update program, one sales scenario presented involved a passerby stopping into a dive shop after work on Friday, and in response to his inquiries, responding that "We have a class beginning tonight, and you can be a certified diver by Sunday night." They went on to outline how, if you have confined water and open water venues in close proximity, you can do it all in one weekend, by doing each of the open water dives right after completing the corresponding confined water dive, a practice the standards had, at that point, already allowed for a few years.

Even if standards did allow doing that many CW & OW dives in two days, it is not possible to get through all the required skills for any but the smallest classes. And that would assume no major student problems along the way, which rarely happens by the way.

It's 3 CW and 2 OW dives on Saturday, and 2 CW and 2 OW dives on Sunday. Obviously, the student has to go through the reading/viewing and knowledge reviews during the evenings, and if they write a yes on any part of the medical form, it's not going to work. Most people can meet the letter minimum of the PADI standards without a problem. Heck, a drunken chimp could do that.

On another note, i did PADI BOW class over 25 years ago and did not have to perform all the skills that are required today. We were however task loaded with problems much, much worse than today. Things like getting your mask or fins ripped off, getting your air turned off, getting your regulator ripped out, buddy breathing, ditch and don, etc. Not really hard until they started hitting you with combinations of the above.

And then not really hard as long as you kept your head about you.

All we knew about trim back then was if you were fat, you weren't trim. Buoyancy control was going down when you wanted to and going up when you wanted to. Gas management was not running out of air at depth. Proper ascent rate was ascending no faster than your smallest bubbles (now generally known to be faster than the max recommended 60 FPM.)

Well, then your training was not typical. 20 years ago, we learned to hover and be horizontal, and how to calculate air consumption. As for ascent rates, if the research atr the time had known to go slower, we would have been taught that. My mother's chemistyr teacher taught that there were 96 elements; that isn't an indictment of her instructional methodology.

OW class back then was better in some ways and worse in others IMO. The fantasy of how great yesterdays training was in comparison to todays is exactly that ..... a fantasy.

I'm sorry, but it was better on many levels. The stuff you speak of tested your panic threshold - a very important thing. Training then did more than impart knowledge, it filtered for personality traits, like a tendency to panic, that, IMO, are contraindications to diving. Also, I view it from a much larger perspecive - a societal one. Dive training then rewarded those who approached life from an "I am capable" perspective with entry into a really neat sport, whereas training today encourages the learned helplessness that will ultimately bring down our civilization.

 

[gj62]

20 years ago, we learned to hover and be horizontal, and how to calculate air consumption. As for ascent rates, if the research atr the time had known to go slower, we would have been taught that.

Through which agency? As of 1980ish, I was current with 2 and my shop offered a 3rd and *none* required that you calculate air consumption (nor is it in their manuals - I just checked PADI/SSI from then - yes, I still have them ). As far as being horizontal - surely you jest. Maybe in your hover, but that was nowhere near a requirement for the PADI/NAUI/SSI back then...

I'm sorry, but it (training) was better on many levels. The stuff you speak of tested your panic threshold - a very important thing. Training then did more than impart knowledge, it filtered for personality traits, like a tendency to panic, that, IMO, are contraindications to diving.

Again, the agencies were not required to stress you during your class to test your performance - that may have been what your instructor opted to do, but it wasn't at the behest of the training curriculum. Of course, you always heard of certain rigorous training exercises, but they had more of a negative spin, rather than a positive attribute of training at that time.