Repairing Society’s Backbone

In the United States, it is virtually impossible to get anywhere you need without utilizing a car, especially for bigger families. In a growing population of two-income households, fewer parents are able to take their teenagers where they need to go, so it becomes crucial for teens to learn how to drive, sometimes as young as 15 years old. Adolescence in itself is a huge growing period full of hormonal imbalances, finding yourself journeys, and growth through resilience that help shape the person you are after K-12 education.

In the present day, driver’s education is not playing an important enough role. 15 to 19-year-olds are the most abundant drivers while also being the most inexperienced drivers. High schoolers specifically are not being given the resources to learn how to drive anymore. I myself, at twenty years old, do not know how to comfortably drive on the streets because of my lack of practice and the increase in motor vehicle crashes daily. Even though I am blessed to have parents willing to drive me where I need to go, driver’s education would give us the space for learning to drive and the rules of the road to our future drivers in the hopes of creating safer streets. The lack of rule enforcement or understanding of the rules has led to several preventable deaths all over the nation. For instance, being born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, I have seen and even experienced these collisions myself. We as a society are missing the ability to care for one another like we used to, and this, coupled with the lack of punishment for breaking road rules, has led to these issues today.

The improvements of the internet have brought a lot of change to how school systems run their classrooms, offices, and teaching styles, but this development has also led to major challenges. The main challenge facing roads today is digital screen usage. As cars get newer and newer, teenagers are being exposed to techier vehicles, whether it is taking a hands-free phone call or placing a shopping order from a Tesla car screen. Policies need to continue to develop to get around these added distractions built into the car’s hardware. An idea for teaching the dangers of getting distracted while driving is to teach in driver’s ed, to have each student, while the instructor is driving, close their eyes for four seconds and ask them what they missed. Chances are, if done correctly, they will have missed seeing a red light, a crosswalk, or a random car obstructing the driving path. The goal with this exercise is to show through example how missing just four seconds of the road from a text or call can cost your life.

Fear should not be created through experiencing a near-death car crash; instead, it should be created through cautioning teenagers about how dangerous it really can be. In one of my college courses, I was tasked with researching and learning more about child restraint laws in relation to the number of deaths in motor vehicle crashes. Through this research, I learned that road laws are determined by the state and not the federal government. Once I learned this, it made sense why you would see more deaths or serious injuries within states with less enforced road laws. This fact was very troubling to me at first because it is the lack of proper reinforcement that has contributed to the car crashes and deaths on the road every year. Having this scholarship available gives me hope in our ability as a society to correct where we have gone wrong. It is very difficult to teach teenagers of today the correct rules when our government has not put in the funds and the necessary consequences for current drivers not following the rules either. The only way we can start clean with the newer generations is by also encouraging the older generations to do what is safest too.

Teenagers’ main influences come from the environment they are surrounded by; this is why it is so important for the schools and communities to be the first areas we consider in taking action. In schools, we need to start talking about driving safety as a complement to the middle school and high school curricula to create generational change in habits on the road. The easiest way to reach half of the community is through their school systems because children, by law, are required to attend school from K-12th grade. For example, posting posters exercising safe driving practices around school areas can help passively show teens what they should and should not be doing. In my experience, posters and infographics have always caught my eye for teaching me about community issues instead of lectures or an outdated video. In addition, a more active strategy could be teaching older kids using clips of car crashes or results of not properly following safety measures in the car to show the raw outcomes of disobeying the rules. As for the rest of the community, utilizing incentives to reward people for following road rules can help encourage others to follow, eventually having the majority of people change their habits. Incentives are useful in any size community because they can be adapted in the government structures or if the population permits, between one another locally.

The road to safer conditions is a long journey, but through implementing road safety education earlier, pressuring the government to take more accountability in road laws, strengthening access to driver education courses, and utilizing incentives, I think we as a society will get closer to our goal. Teenagers, on average, will drive more cautiously, which will result in more lives saved. More lives mean more pride in our nation and could ultimately help bring back the compassion and care lost throughout the years. Our roads reflect our nation. So let us take back the roads and change the future.