Driver’s Ed: Waste of Time or Saving Lives?

Practically everyone, myself included, has driven irresponsibly at some point. My mom, for example, used to take me to school every day with a coffee cup in one hand and the steering wheel in the other and sometimes resorted to driving hands-free when there was a long straight. I have friends who have taken me to school that spend much of their time driving on Instagram. I’m guilty of letting myself be distracted by changing the radio channel when I should focus on the road. I’ve never been in a car accident myself, but I’ve seen them happen and know plenty of people who have been affected. These experiences, while unfortunate, are critical to reflect on because they help us understand how to become better and safer drivers and help others become safer on the road.

I took Driver’s Ed the summer before my freshman year because it’s required before you can do anything behind the wheel in North Carolina. I wanted so badly to be able to drive that I was willing to sit in a classroom six hours each day for a whole week in the summer. All we did was read textbook chapters and watch videos about driver safety. I don’t remember much about it except that an eccentric man in a bright yellow helmet came in one day to explain sharing the road with motorcycles. He gave our class some new perspective on the importance of checking your blind spots and leaving enough following distance. He was very outgoing. Every few minutes he’d stop his safety demonstration to brag about his motorcycling experiences. His humor and quirkiness made him hard to forget. I imagine he stopped by the school every week to give a demonstration with a new class each time. He said he had been giving demonstrations for something like thirty years. He alone has probably spoken to at least ten thousand students, but the number of lives he has indirectly saved just because he was good at making people feel interested in road safety is harder to calculate. I think his example summarizes the importance of driver education in reducing the number of deaths resulting from driving. People who have learned to care about these issues can more easily learn to prevent them.

Granted, I’m not saying my Driver’s Ed experience was good overall. Most of the other students were at least two years older than me and taking the class because their parents pressured them to get their licenses before they graduated. Many would leave their quizzes totally blank except to write their Snapchat handle in the name box. They spent the mornings every day on their phones trying to figure out how to DoorDash Bojangles to the school for lunch. We eventually ran out of textbook chapters to read, so our teacher spent an hour turning on the old projector in the classroom. She lost her tape about drunk driving and showed a movie about anti-bullying instead (which I’m not saying is unimportant, but I question its relevance). I finished the class knowing absolutely nothing new about driving except how to make sure I didn’t hit a motorcycle. Since Driver’s Ed experiences like this are not uncommon, it’s no surprise that tens of thousands die in driving accidents each year. I think that improving the standards for Driver’s Ed and instituting a thorough curriculum could substantially reduce the number of driving-related deaths. For example, I believe that a federal standard for driving education would make it easier for teachers to create similar lessons across the country.

Although each state has requirements for driver’s education, some of which seem detailed enough, it is clear from my experience that they are not well-implemented. I feel that many of these requirements exist to create the appearance of a response to driving-related deaths rather than to create actual change. We can improve the system of driver’s education by selecting teachers who have a good understanding of the impact of driver’s education and who are well-qualified. While this may make it more difficult to find teachers, I believe that the investment would save many lives. For example, I can’t remember the name of the motorcyclist with the yellow helmet I described in this essay, yet I remember his passion for road safety and the lessons he taught our class very well. If more educators like him were involved in driver’s education, people would learn road safety from the classroom rather than learning the hard way from a hospital bed.