Honestly though, by raising a number that can be "created" instead of "actually performed" will not help as much as many seem to think. Remember no one has to sign every dive, and no agency polices the logbook. Also, a 3-month program could EASILY get most of the 100-200 dives in. Let's go conservative.. if you did 2 dives a day, 5 days a week, in a typical 3-month period there are 13 weeks. So you can amass 130 dives just through a 3-month course with only conservative numbers. Now you may take a few days off, have instruction only on days, etc, but if you did 3-4 dives in a few days you immediately make that up.. and this all assumes you take off 2 days a week. I have met people going through courses similar to this that went hard-core and did 3-4 dives a day, 6 days a week. Over 3 months you are talking about 234 - 312 dives in a 3-month period. But hey, they got the "new" required 100-200 dives in. Yes they crammed it in, but how is that different than a crash course of anything else.. as long as the student applies themselves in earnest. Some people get annoyed that someone can spend 3-months doing the same thing it took others years to attain. Yet the person spending 3-months is spending almost every waking hour preparing. While the other person spends 3-6 hours a week in a pool and class and maybe another 1-4 hours preparing.
It is not the quantity that should be the issue, but the quality. I am an instructor that started diving in 1996. I teach some kids that have parents diving since the '70s. I have had no one confront me on my style in any of my classes. I have another instructor friend that started diving in 2004. He did solid, quality dives, took his studies seriously, and is a good instructor. He does not have the breadth of diving locations that I have, but he has enough QUALITY dives to draw from when he is teaching.
That would be like saying a school teacher is not credible when they get out of school until they build up at least x hours of instruction. Good luck getting that.
I am not picking on one person's quote on this, just a general view on my part that I have seen as a trend advocating upping the dive number requirement.. People always hammer on # of dives as if it is the end all number. Each person's mind-set, desire and attention to learning and skills will dictate whether they will make a good instructor. Going into a class and saying oh this person can't be old enough to teach me anything is a defeatist attitude.
If you want to promote diver safety and industry growth and environment safety, then you should advocate quality and not quantity. If you set a higher number, people will still hit the number, but they will forego quality to attain quantity.
One thing I think PADI should consider is an exit interview. When they go to an IE (Instructor Exam), the candidate should have to have a conversation with a skilled diving instructor. The point should not be to trip up the candidate, but rather to get a handle on mind-set, general philosophy, offer up scenarios to learn from, etc. A rather simple 20-30 minute exit interview could do so much for people's mind-sets and attitudes before releasing them to the general public... The Course Director that brought the candidate should have a handle on all this already, but the dive agencies could really add value here.
I am only expressing an opinion and am in no way going to start a food fight on this - just interjecting another line of thought into the whole raise the # concept.....
Now back to our regularly scheduled post topic....
