Teaching saves lives

Driving can be liberating, but it can also be deadly. In the entire world, every day, there are tons of people behind the wheel making reckless decisions, and this endangers them and other road users. The United States is the country with the most car crashes reported annually, this is even more evident when compared with other nations, “there were 1,949,000 car crashes in the United States in 2019, followed by 381,000 in Japan and 300,143 in Germany in the same period”. As a country with a culture of driving as a necessity rather than a privilege, there have been a lot of adjustments and additions done to our laws for the road, but there still exists a substantial amount of accidents; one solution to this is to educate people about driving way before they reach the legal age to do so.

The most common age at which people begin to learn to drive is 16 years old, but it would be way better if they started learning long before that. Just as we teach kids the basics of math and English at a young age, we should do the same with driving: teach them the basics about the rules, the risks, what to do and what not to do, and reinforce that throughout their school years, as well as increasing the complexity of what they learn as they grow older. This way, kids can have a notion of what it implies to get behind the wheel and feel ready once they begin learning how to drive more in detail at the age of 15-16 to, later on, get in a real car. Teaching them when they’re very young can also help them understand that they are not invincible and that they can be involved in roadway accidents. This carefree feeling is the same thing that leads, mainly teenagers but older people as well, to do things that increase their likelihood of ending up in car crashes. “The risk of motor vehicle crashes is higher among teens ages 16–19 than among any other age group. Teen drivers in this age group have a fatal crash rate almost three times as high as drivers ages 20 and older per mile driven” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

It should be clear that learning how to drive with one of your parents or relatives is nothing like taking a course in an accredited driving school. Both present different information from different angles or perspectives, and they can complement each other. In a course, you will usually learn the rules and techniques of driving exactly how they are, and you will be taught how to do it in the safest way possible. With parents or relatives, on the other hand, you can be taught in a way that goes more into detail about how things are in real life. They can talk to you about their own experiences, how to do certain maneuvers in other ways you weren’t told in your driving school, and more. Learning at a school and learning with parents should go together, it’s the best way to ensure that new drivers know as much as possible once they begin putting all the theory into practice.

Accidents on the road are deemed to be inevitable for anyone who ever gets behind the wheel, whether it is for one’s own mistakes or another road user’s mistakes. I have been involved in a road accident myself: when I was around three years old, my parents, a few other family members, and I were in a car that was not in its best condition, and my dad was driving. Due to a few oversights of his, the car ended up rolling over. Fortunately, no one was severely hurt. A more recent accident I know of is one that happened to one of my cousins a couple of years ago: one of her cats had gotten out of her apartment while she was out and my mom and I were there to see when the cat got out. We called her to let her know since we couldn’t find a way to take the cat back inside, but notifying her had the opposite effect of what we would ever want. She panicked and stressed out about something possibly happening to her cat and this distracted her partially from driving safely, causing her to end up in a crash against a road divider. Fortunately, again, it didn’t result in a fatal event: only my cousin’s car was severely damaged, and she just got a few bumps. But not everyone can say the same, not everyone has gotten the opportunity to be here to tell after it happens, people’s lives have been changed for the worse because of these accidents. This is why having safer, defensive drivers on the road is so important to reducing the number of victims as much as possible.

Driving education is extremely important for every single person who considers ever getting behind the wheel. The freedom of driving should always come along with the responsibilities. We need to create a culture in which knowing how to drive safely is just as common as understanding basic math, a culture in which the least amount of people possible have this sense of “it won’t happen to me.” Because it can, and if it does, you need to know the best way to handle it.