The days have long gone when you could drive a motor vehicle while munching on a bowl of cereal, as one Vancouver driver was discovered doing recently.

Modern motoring and modern motor cars have become so complex you almost need a degree to be able to drive.

Indeed, if there is one subject we should be teaching our children from the earliest possible age, it is how to be a good motorist -- not how to love the Nisga'a treaty.

Driver education, including the psychology of motoring, should be a compulsory school subject from kindergarten to Grade 12, just like math and English. It should be a degree course at university.

We hear a lot about the evils of drugs and other crime. But, car crashes cause far greater carnage, killing 3,000 Canadians and injuring another 240,000 each year.

Most of that mayhem is caused by bad, emotionally-challenged drivers. So there is very little that is funny about "road rage," in which righteously-indignant motorists become so disturbed by real or imagined slights from other drivers, their brains explode into mush like shattered pumpkins, causing irrevocable havoc.

If there ever was a bright side to road rage, however, it was contained in a Reuters news agency story last week about raging California grannies.

An 88-year-old woman had pulled into a handicapped parking space at a Santa Clara hospital. Unhappily, it was the same space into which a 67-year-old lady had been waiting to squeeze, while bringing her 98-year-old mom in for an appointment.

The 67-year-old female knocked on the window of the 88-year-old's vehicle, but the older woman was hard of hearing and ignored her. Outside the car, some pushing and shoving ensued and the older woman hit the pavement.

When the smoke cleared, the 88-year-old was in hospital with a broken hip, the 67-year-old was awaiting news of possible criminal charges and the 98-year-old was a potential witness.

The fact is road rage -- or parking lot rage -- involves people of all ages and all nationalities, not just aggressive Americans.

Handicapped parking spaces bring out the worst in Canadians too. An Edmonton driver called Dave boasted on the Internet about using his one-ton van to ram a taxi driver who refused to budge from just such a space.

"It cost him $2,700 for repairs and he was out of service for three months," Dave said.

Can you imagine what he'd have done if the cabbie had cut him off? Run him over and left him to die?

We Canadians like to think of ourselves as a kinder, gentler people than Americans. We are anything but, according to an ongoing study of nasty driver habits by road rage expert Leon James, a Canadian psychology professor now teaching at the University of Hawaii.

James's on-line survey has found that 30 per cent of Canadian drivers admit to making insulting gestures to other motorists, compared to 24 per cent of Americans; 15 per cent of Canadians admit to chasing other motorists in "hot pursuit," as against eight per cent of Americans, and five per cent to getting into actual fights, versus two per cent of Americans.

The Reader's Digest calls Vancouver drivers some of Canada's worst.

"Welcome to British Columbia," said writer Robert Kiener, "where at least 150,000 drivers are un-licenced and prohibited."

It is the un-hinged drivers that worry both me and James. He says we are not training our children at an early enough age about driving skills, driving psychology -- and driving morality.

"We need to teach kids how to drive because that's part of the essential skills of an adult human being today," he said in a telephone interview recently.

ICBC, of course, does not believe in school driver education.

If you do, write us and let us know -- without taking your hands off the wheel.