My Testimony on Drivers Ed

Drivers Ed, the most dreaded, and still the most sought out subject of learning for teenagers around the country. Many claim it is useless, while others can’t fathom the chaos we would live in without it. The truth is, drivers Ed, while tedious, is crucial to maintaining road safety.

While it is true that many choose to disregard safe driving practices, the majority of people still follow most rules and precautions dictated to them during drivers education. Without this mandatory exposure and learning of laws, signals, and practices, most people would opt for ‘winging it’ during their first driving sessions, and another subset of people would never even attempt to learn any of this information, and would continue to drive recklessly for a lifetime. While the next statement seems obvious, it must be said. Driver’s education is crucial in preventing and reducing driving-related deaths, as it is the only sure way to ensure a platform of safety knowledge is presented and learnt by everyone with a license.

Of course, the system is not perfect, and everyone agrees that driving-related deaths are a consistently pressing issue in this country. The obvious option to counteract the increase of these incidents is to impose stricter punishment and regulations, but these efforts would prove virtually useless, as the people who drive recklessly have already decided to throw the rulebook out their window, completely disregarding any level of consequences. The addition of more punishment would simply tackle the problem, and does so ineffectively. The real effort should focus on tackling the root of the problem, which is that often, people find drivers ed disinteresting, and the status quo encourages the casual dismissal of rules and limits. For the former problem, the goal is to adapt the learning system to newer generations. Changing times require changing systems, after all. Young people are becoming increasingly bored and exasperated with traditional classroom learning, often remarking that hands-on and interactive learning is more effective and attention-grabbing. This means a complete remodel of the teaching system for drivers education is called for. Instead of using traditional classroom learning, driving schools could universally create and adopt other means of learning, such as interactive videos, acting real case-scenarios, or encouraging the use of the thousands of resources available online (which have been ultimately created by the people, to help the people). In terms of changing the status quo, a more widespread effort is required. The most feasible way to tackle this aspect of reckless driving is to look to the long term. Just like how leaders can spend millions on political campaigns, they should be able to do the same to campaign for the younger generation to be safer. It might not change every rising young driver’s mentality, but it is almost certain to change a non-negligible percentage of minds.

Unfortunately for me and many others, most of my family and peers engage in irresponsible driving regularly. With friends, the common offense is speeding, usually 20 or more miles per hour over the limit. The second most common irresponsible behaviour is phone usage whilst driving, this one manifesting itself in both adults and teenagers. After these, there are many behaviours, including illegal turns, aggressive driving, lack of a valid license, and failure to obey restrictions, among others. While I myself have never been in an accident, I can name over 30 of my friends and family who have, and 25 of them caused or contributed to the accident by their own negligence and ignorance of the rules.

Now, these problems are extremely widespread through all communities, and until some major reworking of our society takes place, us little people have to take action by ourselves. Personally, I think the best way to catalyze change in your world is to be the perfect example of it. From the first moment I was able to drive myself, I pledged to be the best example of a good driver that I could be. This pledge was brought about by one of the facts I listed before: Most of my friends and family are irresponsible drivers, and I was going to be the exception. From that point forward, I slowly realized that simply being safe around people was more effective at changing their own conduct than actually addressing it specifically. After all, what better way is there to change the Status Quo than breaking it right in front of society’s eyes. While it is hard for State and Federal agencies to accomplish this, it is much more plausible if individuals inside the communities choose to tackle the issue. After all, every change a society has ever experienced started with a small number of people breaking away from the norm. By serving as an example to those around me, I create a cascading effect of drivers becoming safer, simply because they have seen someone else do it. Then those drivers influence the people in their world, and the cycle will repeat exponentially.

To some degree the critics are right, driver’s education is certainly not as effective as it could be. Like the school system, it is starting to become obsolete, and is in need of serious change. However, we must all recognize that, while flawed, it is necessary to establish a system of understanding between drivers everywhere. It is up to us to demand change, to propose ideas for improvement, but it is also up to us, the people, to become that change and make both ourselves and everyone around us safer.