As a junior in highschool I was on the school newspaper as a reporter. The story that I chose for the month's online cycle was about our school's driver education program. For this story, whose link is provided below if you would like to read it, I had the privilege of interviewing both the instructors of the program and students from my school who took the class.
During my interview with the instructors, he said something that really caught my attention. He informed me about the statistic that texting and driving is just as dangerous as drunk driving. Gen Z is well known for being on their phones a lot and using their phone to control the music they listen to while they are driving. This causes a lot of little distractions on the road. Little distractions, however, could mean the difference between getting home safely or not. Students who take driver's education are less likely to use their phones while driving than those who did not because of how they are taught to drive. Being taught by only your parents does not provide a back bone for many things with driving as parents are only teaching the hows, and rarely the why. The “Why?” I was told by students during interviews, is what keeps them off their phones while driving. Knowing how many people die a year from texting and driving reduces the likelihood of texting and driving.
In Missouri, driver's education is not a legal requirement to get your driver's license, and while Missouri is in the minority of states not requiring it, the bills that are in the state congress get stuck very early on because that would mean government funding. Because of this, it is often up to schools to provide the class. Promoting the class is also important. My school is notorious for producing pretty horrible drivers, but I think that it is because the driver’s education program isn’t very well known. My main goal for the story was to make the program more well known to parents of students earning their learner’s permit.
I have found that along with the phone distractions, often driving is performed more dangerously when you are driving a friend somewhere. Whenever I drive a friend I used to drive a little bit faster to show them I was cool and I could drive over the speed limit, but now I am less worried about how fast I drive to a location, and more worried about getting there in one piece. Driving with friends, however, does have its positives because having someone in your passenger seat means you have someone to look at your phone in case of an emergency situation. Getting lost for example, it is hard to pull up a GPS to your destination while you're operating a car so having your passenger do it for you increases safety for you and everyone in the car.
Promoting driver’s education courses or even just safe driving habit information to young, new drivers is imperative because once you have a habit it is hard to break. If you are used to texting and driving you are more likely to continue to do so until you get into an accident as a result of the action. Becoming comfortable with doing dangerous things heightens the danger factor because you are no longer scared of it. Being scared of doing something that could harm you is good and is a very good reason to not let unsafe habits develop. I unfortunately know this is true because my good friend got into a car accident while she was texting and driving because she was too comfortable with doing it, but once she got into the accident she never did it again because she actually understood the dangers of habits like that. If schools or anyone in her life had done a better job at warning her about the dangers of texting and driving she would not have gotten into the car accident which totaled her car, but thankfully left her unharmed.
The overall concept of safe driving is passed from the teacher to the student, if the teacher is an unsafe driver then so will the student. It is important for everyone to be properly schooled on what safe driving really means so that unsafe habits can be stopped before they can be passed onto someone else. Drivers education is the best way to ensure this because the instructors have years of experience with teaching teens safe driving habits.