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/