Having been born in august of 1992, I could not legally get my drivers permit until I turned 15 and a half. This happened in February of this year and I had my first experiences with driving and the DMV. To start on my long processes towards driving I had to complete drivers “training” which we can now do online. This seemed odd to be as in California they have been making they’re under 18 driving laws stricter. For instance you have to be 17 to drive with people under 18 whereas just a few years ago it was 16 and a half. But when you do drivers training online there is nothing stopping you from breezing through the slides and just going straight to the test on which you can promptly cheat on if you desire. I did not cheat on lessons I deemed relevant. However on some of the lessons such as the Drugs and Alcohol section I skipped most of the slides. Why? Because being a student in the public school we have had the same ideas drilled into our brain since 4th grade when parents would come in and tell us not to smoke PCP (Which seemed pointless as I did not know any nine year olds in the suburb small town of Moraga who smoked PCP). And after several years of this we students just start to get desensitized to it and than we don’t take it seriously. But I digress, back to driving.

On these driving lessons they try and drill into your brain simple rules, such they importance of stopping at a stop sign, but than the lessons completely neglect to mention how exactly how to drive. I suppose that is hard to teach but when I first got behind the wheel I promptly accelerated towards the curb, not knowing how hard to push the gas. My friend accelerated into his potted plants. At that point the five plus hours I wasted on driver’s education seemed just like a formality. But then again I clicked through all the slides and played flash games during the videos.

Realistically I think that the you must be over eighteen to get your license. I would be mad now if they changed it but, teenagers are dumb. Most of teens don’t realize just how dangers mixing drugs and driving are. From what I have seen most people think that smoking pot and than driving is perfectly fine. I have even heard of people drinking and driving and they show no remorse. Also they don’t how dangerous a car actually is, being a two ton death machine, and drivers ed cannot teach them that. They see it and they say that will never be me, what could possibly go wrong.

The rules they give us for our permit are meaningless. We have our permit for half a year and are expected to drive fifty hours ten of which are at night. This is a fine and dandy precaution but is only useful if the parents enforce it, but when most parents are sick of driving their kids around they will just try and get a lot of hours and than just sign the papers. But that’s the trouble with the idea of driving under 18 a great deal of responsibility is placed on the parents, most of which who do not fully understand their responsibilities in the processes, it would make more sense if the parents had to go to drivers ed with their children. But then again they might cheat to.