Why are so many High School students not “college ready?”

This is a question that baffles so many educators today.  There are a large amount of high school students who graduate high school and go in to college having to take one or more remedial course.  There has been a recent scramble in secondary education to push more rigor into their curriculums.  Students are placed into more classes built around the basics.  More, more, more seems to be one of the most common answers to this challenge.  

What if we looked at this dilemma differently?

What if instead of upping the standardized education, we stepped back in secondary education.  What if we focused on the strengths and helped students begin to manufacture their own interests?  The trend of going directly into college right after high school is beginning to change.  There are several reasons for this such as high costs, non-tangible classes, wasted time, and not understanding one’s passions.  Finding passion is where I think the secondary education system needs to improve.  

Instead of everything being so programmed in high school, I feel the students would be better served if they were able to explore their interests more during their last year of two of high school.  

In the last two years of high school, we should be teaching students how to engineer their own passion.  

The first way we do this is to teach people to self reflect and understand their micro-motives.  In order to understand a micro-motive, one must learn about themselves.  They must understand who they are and why they do the things they do.  We should spend more time in those years of school really focusing on people rather than subjects.  We should be assessing students on their power of choice.  We should be working with our youth on how they unpack their actions and interests rather than placing ALL things in categories or subjects.  When we learn to teach the human being and not the subject, we take the power away from the institution and place it into the hands of the students.  

The knowledge about one’s self is so much more powerful than the institutional knowledge that is delivered daily in schools in the late years of secondary education.  

I feel only then can our students not only be “college ready” but life ready.  Until secondary education starts taking this approach, we will continue to struggle to show people they know more about themselves than institutions do.