At least not in the US..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOHa9Oji19g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy8LJx71_9o

I really wish that I had more thorough instruction when I was a kid. Basically, what I learned was basic car control, how to read signs, and how to stay away from other cars. I wasn't taught -- at least not through official means -- how to drive in snow or rain, how to read traffic flow, how easy it really is to lose control and how to get it back, etc etc. Sometimes I'm surprised that I've made it this far without totaling my own car.

*add-on* I appreciate that you got to do an advanced school, but really, shouldn't everyone have to take instruction like that? It's not like your car is any more dangerous than any others and needs you to know more about driving. Out on the road, everyone from a 16-year-old rookie to someone who started in a Model T, from national amateur racing champions to totally unskilled accident magnets, is put in control of equally dangerous machinery on the same roads in the same conditions as everyone else. Everyone should, then, have to learn those "advanced" skills.
/*add-on*

*add-on #2 * I think my point really is -- would you trust the idiots you see every day to teach people how to drive? Because when the required driver's ed courses don't teach very much to begin with, the knowledge gap between the classroom and reality has to be filled somehow -- and it's going to be filled by the idiots who are friends and family to a new driver. Better to teach all the correct stuff to begin with, IMO, than to let them be taught bucketfuls of misinformation.
/*add-on #2*