Posted by Kendall Raine on October 17, 2000 at 10:33:12:
In Reply to: Re: PADI sells out, yet again... posted by MHK on October 16, 2000 at 14:06:19:
Michael
The fault with PADI isn't just greed. It's worse than greed. It's hubris and cynical calculation. PADI's whole instructional paradigm is to de-emphasize the instructor in favor of rote adherence to the course outline. On the one hand this stems from the belief that only through such blind conformity can quality control be assured. PADI recognises that in mass producing instructors, DM's and thereby OW and other certs the quality of the diver will suffer. The hubris comes inasmuch as many in the PADI hierarchy sincerely believe that standards, not instructor quality/judgement, is the way solve the conundrum. They want it both ways.
On the other hand, such reliance on standards allows PADI to shift blame and liability for an incident from itself to the instructor for "not following standards." They tell their instructors that adherence to standards protects them (the instructor) and allows for low cost insurance. This is only part of the truth and this is the cynical part of the model. The more narrowly defined the standards, the easier it is for plaintiff's attorney to find some example where an instructor deviated from "standards." Since PADI certifies so many people and relatively few of them get killed, the inferrence is that the standards must be OK and that the instructor's deviation from them caused the incident. This is part of the reason PADI tries so hard to convince everyone that the population of "active" (defined as doing something like 6-10 dives a year!!) divers in the US is so large i.e 2 million +. The fact is they haven't got the foggiest idea how many "active" divers there are. The circularity of this is obvious.
With the issue of quality instruction now reliant on the quality of the materials rather than the instructor, it becomes easier to introduce less and less experienced divers into the supervisory cadre and get away with it from a liability perspective. In fact, it's often easier to make DMs/Instructors out of inexperienced divers since they have few points of reference (experience in diving) from which to challenge PADI dogma. The lower the experience threshold, the more instructors PADI recruits and the more certs are produced-your point about greed.
The solution is simple: 1) Insist that instructors/DM's have greater experience before both entering and completing instruction, 2) enact tougher standards for gaining certification at a professional level, 3) raise standards for entry level scuba certification even if it means flunking people now and again 4) enrich the content, 5) require instructors and DM's to take a periodic "live" renewal examination of the their skills,and 5) charge more by holding themselves out as the quality leader.
The idea that PADI will now propagate this mass-produced one-size-fits-all lower-quality forget- judgement-and-follow-standards diving-is-for-everybody mindset into deeper more complex dives will have the obvious result that diving accidents will go up and instructors will be even more at risk from the "deviation of standards" Boogey Man. In a 1992 artical in the Undersea Journal Drew Richardson quoted the philosopher in writing "those who forget the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat it" in reference to the glorification in certain mainstream dive magazines of dives deeper than 130 fsw. Looks like PADI too have forgotten those lessons.