Drivers ed: A Life-Saving Necessity

Driver
education for many teenagers across the country is only a boring,
unnecessary step to becoming a licensed driver. So many of these
teenagers do not take these required courses seriously and end up
suffering from it down the road once they receive their license.
Drivers ed courses teach students many essential driving skills
such as defensive driving, scanning the road to prevent tunnel
vision, and when and where to use your breaks on the highway. These
essential driving skills along with the discouragement of distracted
driving greatly reduce the chances of young drivers dying from
automobile accidents. However, more can be done to reduce driving
related deaths. Many of my peers have taken drivers ed classes
online instead of taking an in-person class. From what I have heard,
my peers who opted to take driver ed online drive more recklessly,
passively, and come closer to getting into accidents than my peers
who took driver ed in a classroom setting. When students take a
classroom based drivers ed course, they are more likely to take
the content more seriously and recall the information when they need
it most as licensed drivers. Furthermore, there are hundreds of
stories across the country about the effects distracted driving has
had on regular people; if students heard these testimonials and saw
the effects of distracted driving in drivers ed courses, they
would be less likely to drive distracted. Requiring drivers ed
students to take classes in physical classrooms as well as including
distracted driving testimonials during the course is the best way for
teenagers to take classes more seriously while reducing the amount of
driving related deaths, especially among teenagers.

Personally,
I have been in a car accident. Now I should say that it was a very
minor accident, but it has left its mark on me for years to come. I
was taking two teammates who could not drive yet home after baseball
practice when I was sixteen. I was only allowed one passenger at the
time, so I was already breaking the law. We made a stop at
McDonald’s then headed home. I turned onto one of the narrowest
streets in town but took the turn too wide because I was talking to
my backseat passenger while eating a hamburger. Luckily the side of
the road was lined by the chain-link fence that surrounded the
football field, so I ended up taking out twenty feet of fence without
any damage to my vehicle. Using this story, I can advise younger
drivers of my immature actions that led to a cool eight hundred
dollars being drawn from my bank account to fix the fence. Hopefully
my story will deter others from driving distracted with passengers in
the vehicle, and I learned a very valuable lesson without injuring
myself or others.