2024 Drivers Education Essay

When you’re young, the first thing that most children notice almost immediately are cars. There is a fascination that all children have and go through with cars, watching them drive past your window, listening to the sound of their horns, and trying to count how many red or blue cars you see on the road. As children grow older, the fascination with looking at cars turns into a fascination with how to drive them, and by the time a child reaches their teen years, they are preparing to drive on their own. The question is should these adolescents who barely know how to make sound decisions on their own have the right to drive on the roads?

In the state of New Jersey, the legal driving age is 17, but more than half of the accidents that happen in NJ happen because of drivers under the age of 21. To prevent these accidents, most people conclude that people under 21 should not be allowed to drive but in the main scheme of things age is not the sole reason why young drivers get into more accidents. The typical driver’s education that people under 21 receive normally comes from a driver’s ed course in high school or an online course that has easily accessible answers on Google. Both of these courses are very good for knowing the facts about the law and what to do when you come to a four-way intersection, but none of these classes will teach children how to properly drive, and the small six-hour courses do nothing. I recently took my six hours and all I learned was how to start and stop moving a car, how to enter a nearly empty highway, and how to make almost 100 left and right-handed turns. These lessons are a good starting point, but these lessons don’t teach you how to deal with traffic during rush hour on 287, or what to do when you lose control of your wheel in the rain and you start hydroplaning. While the driver’s education course does an amazing job at telling and teaching students what to do during these stressful situations, they do not show or demonstrate how and it is a lot easier to watch a video or listen to a lecture on how to do these things. What driving schools and courses need to do to reduce deaths is take kids out and teach them what to do during accident-prone situations, such as rush hour traffic or bad weather.

A few weeks ago, it was raining very hard in central Jersey around six pm, and because of daylight savings time, it got dark very fast. I was on my way home from hanging out with some friends when I noticed a car coming up behind me at a very high speed. I was just about to enter the entrance ramp onto I-287, but I decided to move over to let this car pass and enter before me. It was a good thing I did that too, because not even five minutes later the driver lost control of the car in front of me and started hydroplaning in the middle of the interstate, and crashed into the median. This was my first time experiencing an accident on the road as a new driver, so I pulled over and called my mom and then the police to report what I saw, but because of the accident that I witnessed, I was going a steady 40 MPH the entire way home. Before that day, I had never known that if your car reaches a certain speed it is more likely to slip on the road which could result in the car hydroplaning. This situation was an eye-opener for me, it showed me that there were still a lot of things that I did not know about driving. I was never taught or shown what to do when my car hydroplaned, I was only told from reading a book. Or what to do when your car gets stuck in the snow while driving. There is so much that I have learned from taking a driver’s education class, but there is also a lot more that I do not know. Which is why I will always fight to see a better driver education program. A program where the children are not only taught about the basic rules of driving but also what to do in a stressful or potentially dangerous situation. Based on that situation, I have also started to look at how I drive in a different light. I make sure that I take that extra second at a stop sign, or I make sure to always watch the road but also the sides of the streets and woods to see and be prepared for anything that may happen.

Overall, being a safe driver is not only something that will benefit you, but it also affects the entire community. When I make sure that I drive calmly and safely, I know that I bring the chances of having an accident or injuring a person or animal down. But this change should have come just from me, it needs to come from the new drivers that are getting their licenses and the driving schools. If everyone in our community puts in a little bit of effort in trying to improve our driving then the number of deaths per accident and accident number could reduce greatly!