Drivers education is essential

The importance of properly educating our youth when it comes to driving is so incredibly important. There are over 40,000 deaths in the United States every year that are caused by car accidents and even more are left severely injured. The list of what we can do to reduce the number of deaths related to driving goes on and on but a few that can definitely be easily imputed are more in depth drivers education courses in schools, longer behind the wheel instruction requirements, and more extensive behind the wheel tests . If we as a society could implement these then we would have more experienced drivers therefore safer drivers.

Teaching driver’s education in all schools would help significantly in these issues. Then students would know how truly dangerous cars can be and they will learn to be more cautious drivers. Teen drivers, specifically aged 16-19, are the highest risk drivers which are high school aged kids. Being a highschooler myself who was in a driver’s education program at my school I feel like I am truly aware of how dangerous cars can be and how to be a safe driver because my driver’s ed teacher drilled safe driving into our heads. On the other hand being a highschool student also means being in cars with other teen drivers who also took the same drivers ed course but still drives recklessly sometimes. I personally have just recently been in a car crash with my best friend this summer driving home from the lake. She is an incredibly safe driver but there was mud in the road that caused her to lose control of the car and we went into the side of a mountain. We were both totally fine, just shocked that even when driving as safe as she was there were still factors out of her control that caused us to crash. With how much things can be out of your control when you are driving we need driver’s education to teach the youth to be as safe as you can control. Drivers education in my school has taught me so much about how to be a safe driver that I wasn’t even told about in my behind the wheel lessons, like not stopping on train tracks ever. Stopping on train tracks is one of the most dangerous mistakes that you could ever make while driving but I had heard nothing about it until my driver’s ed teacher played my class a video of cars getting hit by trains and telling us never to make that mistake. That is just one of the many things I would’ve never known if my school didn’t offer a drivers education program and that is really scary because that mistake is the difference between life or death. With driving any mistake could be the difference between life and death and that’s why driver’s education is so important, so students can learn not to make those mistakes.

Secondly if we had longer and more structured behind the wheel education then we would be sending better drivers off into the world. The fact that the behind the wheel instruction only requires three two hour lessons is astonishing. That is so little actual time behind the wheel and there is no way that youth is learning all that needs to be learned. I know that I did not. This lack of time behind the wheel is becoming increasingly worse especially with the requirements of the actual driving test becoming less and less. With that, what we are actually being taught is becoming less and less. My behind the wheel instructure only taught me how to back up 100 feet and how to go through a roundabout and that simply wasn’t all I needed to know about driving. There are so many things about driving that I wasn’t taught because my behind the wheel instructor didn’t feel it was necessary to teach me. She didn’t teach me to drive on highways, she didn’t teach me how to merge or change lanes, and she didn’t even teach me how to park. I know that was the case for many of my friends who also got licenses recently, we didn’t learn any of those things but we all needed to. The behind the wheel instruction requirements need to change to include absolutely everything you need to know about driving so that we as a society can be safer and the roads.

Finally, the increasingly falling requirements of the actual driving test is truly terrifying and a big reason there are so many unsafe drivers in the world. The driving test my Mom and Dad took 22 years ago is vastly different and more extensive than the driving test I took last year. My parents had to learn to parallel park, drive on the highway, merge, change lanes, drive in a neighborhood, go through two roundabouts, go through neighborhoods, back up 100 feet, do a three point turn, and park. For my drivers test which was taken at the same DMV all i had to do was drive in a neighborhood and not crash, go though one roundabout, back up 100 feet, and then park. The difference in the tests we had to take is not okay. Our standards for drivers are falling and that is a huge issue. With the driving tests becoming less and less extensive by the year, the less people are learning about how to drive is becoming less and less. This is just creating more and more inexperienced and poor drivers. The actual driving test is such a huge part of how much actual driving people learn because you are taught what is gonna prepare you for the test not what is gonna prepare you for real life driving. If we could get back to the old standard or even just a more extensive test we would have better and safer drivers.

Drivers Education is needed not because it’s going to just make sure that everyone is a safe driver but because it is going to help limit the amount of unsafe drivers and that is a desperate need. That is why I know that driver’s education is an absolute necessity because we cannot continue on like this. We as a world have solved so many problems that were way harder to fix like plagues and financial ruins but we can’t care enough to keep people alive on their drive to work or school. We need driver education to create safe drivers because the unsafe drivers are not the only ones who suffer the consequences of their actions, we all do.