Driver's ed, sex ed (was Re: [HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: I've failed my driving test!)

[Jen Faulkner]

On Sat, 22 May 2004, elfundeb2 wrote:

> What fun!  Driving test nostalgia!

Whee!  Yes! *g*

> It wasn't always this way.  I'm from New Jersey and got my license
> in the '70s.

I'm also from New Jersey, and I got my license a bit more recently ('96,
to be exact), a half-year after my 17th birthday (you could not get your
license until you were 17).

My school did not, in fact, offer driver's ed -- everyone took it
privately, to keep the already prohibitive insurance costs down,
nonetheless.  (NJ has, afaik, the highest auto insurance rates in the
US.)  Nor did, I believe, any of the surrounding towns.  So everyone
took it privately.

Basically, this boiled down to: you took the written test (required to
get your learner's permit, which I *believe* you could have at 16 1/2,
allowing you to drive with, hmm, any driver who'd had their license for
more than five years in the car) on your own, then signed up with one of
several local private companies for the driver's ed.  They actually
merely said that you'd been given classroom instruction (I never was),
and then did 6-8 hours in the car with you.  They mostly taught you how
to pass the test: what the instructors look for on each section (that
you looked before you pulled away from the hill, that you signaled
before beginning the K-[3-point-]turn, and so on).

That was all there was to it.  No highway instruction, and we certainly
spent most of the hours trying to convince me I wouldn't damage the
instructor's shiny red new sports car (you do the hours in their car)
while trying to parallel park between cones on a quiet street.  I am, in
fact, still rotten at and scared of parallel parking.  The test was on a
closed course, so they never had to see how you dealt with other cars,
merely that you could back up 50 feet, hold your hands at 10 and 2, all
that good stuff.

I actually ran the car off the road after parking on the hill (forgot to
turn the wheel back, because I was so busy signalling and looking, the
things you're graded on), and still passed, so really.  Anyone can. *g*

But despite the lack of driver's ed, we had an abundance of sex and drug
ed.  Our health curriculum from 7th-11th grade, for one marking period
(10 weeks) every year, consisted of about half sex ed and half
drug/alcohol ed.  I really had no idea until I got to college that not
everyone did that.  I found out in college (Rutgers, where I was with
mostly other NJ-high school grads, it being the state university) that
private schools didn't have to offer that sort of health class.  But I
was *really* shocked when I found out in grad school, sometime, I think,
that there are places that actually don't do that, other states and so
on.

Our health class was basically "You will ruin your life if you ever,
ever, ever touch drugs, alcohol, or another person, and hey, let's find
out why (so that maybe it won't happen)."  We learned to classify the
major illegal drugs by type, by effects on the body, by addictive
possibilities/withdrawal symptoms, and so on.  We learned
symptoms/treatments/prevention methods/methods of infection for every
major STD.  We learned about preventing pregnancy, over, and over, and
over again.  We learned about all the different stages/types of
alcoholism, as well as about things that could happen while you were
drinking/drunk, even if you weren't an alcoholic.  In 5th-7th grade, we
also covered puberty (and the basics of sex ed); in 11th grade Freudian
defense mechanisms, prejudice, and probably a few other topics like
that, plus, of course, good old sex and drugs.  12th grade was the only
really different year -- we got to do first aid that year (including
CPR, and a few peeps did do the extra work to certify in it), stress,
personality types, all kinds of fun things.  I think we actually
forewent drugs that year, though there was still sex ed.  Every year had
a lot of emphasis on how to combat/not give into peer pressure.

I've since gotten the feeling that other schools went much more with the
'sex and drugs are bad, m'kay?' approach, and that the *amount* of
information we were presented with is highly unusual. They gave us all
the information they could, really.  (My school did, to my personal
regret, not cover same-sex safer sex specifically -- the curriculum was
highly heterosexist--, but it may now.)  When I began the health
curriculum, in '90ish?, the district was unusual for teaching what it
did about AIDS; that it's not a gay disease, that it's only spread in
specific ways, and so on.  Only ten years after the disease's
identification, that was pretty rare (we were still being taught that it
had a 20 year period where the virus wouldn't show up on tests, then).
By the time I graduated high school ('96), of course, it was common to
teach those sorts of things, but even when I was in middle school, they
were serious about keeping the students, all of them, safe.

They really did teach us *why* you should be sensible about certain
things, whether it's STDs or pregnancy or drugs or alcohol.  And they
didn't do that just by horror stories of "Janey got hooked on heroine
and then she got pregnant and then she dropped out of college and
*died*!"  They really did their best to combat teenagers' natural "That
would never happen to *me*"  attitude; the worse the stories are, the
more the kids can say, "Oh, well, that won't happen to me, since I'm
just doing [X]."

We learned a lot about assessing risks, getting information to allow
people to decide for themselves which ones were and weren't worth
taking, by knowing what really *was* a possible/likely consequence and
what wasn't, as well as what you can do to minimize risks.  They were
honest about things like which STDs are curable with antibiotics (and
which aren't), what the failure rates for certain types of birth control
are, how addictive, and in what ways, certain illegal drugs are, as well
as what they feel like when you're on them.  They were honest about what
the dangers -- legally, physically, socially -- of teenage/adult
drinking are.  They only tried to scare us in so far as these things
*are* all scary.  And most of the kids I knew respected the information
all the more for that -- and took it that much more seriously.  Did it
prevent any of my friends from drinking or having sex?  No.  Did they
know how to protect themselves as much as possible when they did?  Yes.

As I think only the second is a worthwhile goal, I think they did a
*really* good job.

David made an interesting point about the proportions/commonality of
driver's ed to sex ed showing that American parents are more afraid of
the possible bad consequences of sex vs. driving.  I think, David,
you're right in many respects that we emotionally regard sex as more
inherently dangerous, but part of that is the necessity of one vs. the
other.  In most American towns -- not cities -- public transportation
simply isn't sufficient to allow one to not drive as an adult.  The
lives of those who cannot drive (my gf is one) are often circumscribed
by that lack.  Even in a city, it limits what one can do; I live in an
area that has a lot of public transportation, relatively, and I could
still never work my current job if I didn't have a car.

Given that, you certainly want to make driving as safe as possible, but
much of the risk cannot be prevented: accidents are often not the
driver's fault (they were the fault of the other driver, or not
preventable at all).  One does one's best, but (and having had one bad
accident, it took me a long time to accept this and start driving again)
at some point, you just have to accept that you will take that risk, and
*not* think about it, because otherwise, well, you won't be driving.

Sex is similar, but in large part the negative consequences are
preventable: many STDs and unintended pregnancies *can* be prevented,
almost entirely.  And assuming one is speaking only of consensual sex,
you have to *do* something to have those consequences occur -- it's
never someone else's fault in the same way as a car accident.  It's more
like, say, not wearing your seatbelt and hitting the windshield of a
car.  It could have been prevented by you.  So too with pregnancy and
STDs.  Methods aren't perfect (comdoms break, and so on), but if proper
effective precautions (not, e.g, the rhythm method of birth control!)
are taken, you might as well worry about lightning strikes and other
unavoidable dangers of living as sex.  You take responsibility for what
you can control, and accept the rest.

And too, sex is not necessary in quite the same way as driving, so many
Americans would like to prevent it outside of completely safe
circumstances (i.e.  marriage), anyway.  I think they're wrong, but,
well, there are those who'd like to have us all use public
transportation, too, and they would disapprove of my hour commute to my
job. *g*  It's not a daily necessity (despite what some people think),
so one should not be willing to accept the same level of risk as with
driving.  If, for instance, any risk at all there be considered
unacceptable by an individual, s/he can choose not to have sex; you can
stop the behavior as a whole with much greater ease than driving.

The same is true for drugs/alcohol.  If an individual considers the
legal/physical/social risks of drugs/alcohol as too high, s/he can again
choose not to engage in the behavior (of drinking or taking other drugs)
at all.  Many Americans now put smoking into this category, as it is
considered a behavior too socially/physically risky to engage in at all;
education of both children and adults has brought about that change in
attitude.  And again, there is no necessity for the behavior comparable
to that of driving.

Nor does that sort of thing need to be taught just once, as in a way
driver's ed really only does.  By emphasizing sex ed (particularly of
the sort I had, that really does teach about safer sex, and what you
*can* do to minimize risks of negative consequences) with repetition and
length of time, it's more likely that the lessons there (don't have
unprotected sex with people whose sexual histories you don't know!  In
fact, don't have unprotected sex at all!) will sink in to a
non-conscious level-- and with that sort of thing, the more automatic a
response you can create, the more likely it is that people will not
engage in truly risky behaviors, since you have to combat everyone's
natural urge to forget caution in moments of, ahem, emotional
excitement.  Driving *is* inherently and inevitably dangerous; sex need
not be so (to the same degree).  And I think most American
schools/parents recognize that, and echo it in the proportion of
driver's ed to sex/drug ed.

Or, well, mine did, anyway.

And yes, I'm finished now. *g*

--Jen, the long-winded :)

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