I was puzzled by your apparent reference to older people currently causing more road accidents. I can see now that you were referring to road accidents 60 to 70 years ago - which if anything is even less relevant and more puzzling. I have no knowledge of the age profile of drivers in those days as compared to today, but then as I already posted "the risk of accident in any activity is greater for a/ beginner b/ newly qualified c/ young males because they are more risk inclined". So I've no doubt that older drivers when first driving a car back in the 30s were fairly accident prone, though I wouldnt know for sure - I wasnt there.
I would expect the MCA callouts to be mainly for older people - ever looked at the demographic of yacht owners? Its your argument about the 1930s drivers all over again.
But what you really seem to be advocating is not training, but some sort of free ride for potential trainers from the RYA. They for their part have a training scheme to run, standards to check and control and it all costs money. So it seems entirely reasonable to me (and judging from the responses to most other posters on these forums) that your wife should be qualified to the appropriate standard and pay the fairly small costs of doing so. No doubt there will be some local authority social services / central govt budgets that can help if necessary.
Maths, physics etc are some help in the teaching of this subject but not a huge amount. And poersonally, I dont see the disaffected being any less so because of the provision of free training that they can then no longer use because they dont have a boat to use it in. But thats another debate