Early Driver's Licenses for Good Students

We all tell kids they should bring their best effort to doing well in school. We all tell them to behave and pay attention, to work hard and be nice.

Yet among themselves, many children find the social currency to be denominated inversely. In a greater culture with sometimes anti-intellectual overtones, many times doing well in school is not in fact "cool". While rebelliousness is a natural and healthy expression of one's own individuality, there is significant peer pressure to rebel against education "with the heard", which of course is not a sign of an individual mindset at all.

We can help to change that, with a bold and decisive new initiative. We propose an initial pilot program, to be scaled up with its success, to offer driver's licenses earlier to good students.

The reasoning behind this isn't purely to encourage a sincere effort towards scholarship. Groups of kids are especially prone to rapid changes in thinking. What was "uncool" two weeks ago can suddenly become the latest and greatest thing. Trends can sweep through a class at the drop of a hat, taking almost everyone along with them. This also applies to development --- dating, for example, is unheard of until it suddenly is the status quo.

There is a time, in middle school and even early high school, when drinking makes a social pariah. Unfortunately, we seem to be handing out driver's licenses at the precise moment in a person's upbringing when alcohol becomes cool. It's a lethal combination.

Since we cannot control the collective mind of teenagers, our only options are to give driver's licenses earlier or later. Though delaying licensure has been tried, ultimately it has shown to be impractical. In many parts of the country, distances are prohibitive to walking or biking, and public transportation simply doesn't exist. Many 16 year olds find themselves in life circumstances in which a car is a virtual necessity, for work for example.

The counterintuitively sensible choice that emerges, therefore, is to try to speed up the process and grant licenses earlier. In doing so, the hope is that a person will have had a number of the close calls seasoned driver's know to be inevitable, well before alcohol takes the social network by storm.

However, in granting licenses earlier across the board, we would miss a valuable opportunity to remove the social stigma against academic success. There are many kids who are trying to do the right thing against the social current, and this is a good way to shift the tide a bit in their favor.

Furthermore, by selecting good students for the earliest eligibility, we also overwhelmingly select those who will become responsible, level headed drivers. Again, the hope is to change the social currency. As the first drivers in their class, they would have the opportunity to "rub off" on their peers. "Hot rod" style driving might come to be appreciated for the recklessness that it is, whereas awareness that a vehicle is a lethal weapon could become a mainstay of social indoctrination.