With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

The
famed French writer Voltaire once said, “With great power comes
great responsibility.” This principle applies to driving in a very
real way. People who can drive have a great power that they need to
take seriously.

From
my personal experience, I can say that neither I nor my friends that
I have talked to about drivers ed remember much from when we
took it. To me, this is a major problem. Drivers ed should be
very important to every driver, and yet it seems that no one takes it
seriously – even the teachers. Drivers ed is supposed to
teach people about the ins and outs of vehicle operation, and it does
accomplish that purpose; but as I alluded to earlier, from personal
experience, no one seems to get much substantial use out of classroom
drivers ed.

There
are two main remedies to this problem. The first is to reduce the
time spent in classroom drivers ed and spend more time getting
actual driving experience. After being in school all day, no aspiring
driver wants to spend another two hours in a classroom learning
guidelines they will quickly forget. Instead, teens learning to drive
should spend more time on the road in the real world and less time
“learning” facts about driving that will not stick in their
memory.

The
other remedy is to increase the age limit necessary to begin learning
to drive. In my home state of Ohio, the age needed to get a temporary
permit to begin learning to drive is 15 and a half, and the age
needed to get a driver’s license is 16. Let’s put these ages in
perspective. At these ages, most people are sophomores in high
school, and some may even be freshman. According to the CDC, over
2,000 teens aged 16-19 died in the U.S. due to a motor vehicle
accident. Is it really a smart idea to put the power of life and
death into the hands of young high schoolers? Rather, teens should
not be eligible to start driving until their junior year of high
school. This will give them more time to mature and learn the frailty
of life and the great burden for safety that driving a motor vehicle
entails.

Implementing
the above proposed solutions will lead to less driver deaths, as
older teens will be more responsible driver than younger teens. They
will also be less like to speed and drive recklessly upon receiving
their license. Many of my friends have fallen prey to the lie that
says driving is all fun and games, and I have seen them drive
recklessly. They don’t realize that when they take the wheel, they
have the power of life and death.

Personally,
I will encourage young people I know who are aspiring to get their
license to understand the importance of the endeavor they are
undertaking, and I will try to be a role model for them and always
drive safely to the best of my ability.

Works
Cited

Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury
Prevention and Control. (2019). Teen
Drivers: Get the Facts.
Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/