Signing a Paper is all it Takes not to Drop Out

In the ninth grade, my entire class and I made a pact to graduate together by signing a huge piece of paper that was to be hung up in the school. It wasn't until now that I realized how incredibly ludicrous that was. The school district couldn't seriously believe that would work, could they?

 As a recent high school student, I can empathize with those who either dropped out or wanted to. Personally, I never wanted to drop out due to the fourth grade when I decided it was my dream to become an architect and design treehouses for writers (maybe me someday) to live in. Nevertheless, imagine yourself as a sixteen year old with no career aspirations, struggling to find meaning in your classes and piles of homework. Think how incredibly frustrating it would be to spend five years struggling to survive your math classes whilst dealing with the typical dramas of adolescence. If you had no career plans or were not a lover of mathematics, you'd note how pointless your math classes were and wonder why in the hell you were learning the quadratic equation. The same can be said for Literary Composition 9-12 or the sequence of sciences: Physics, Biology, and Chemistry. Why does the average person need chemistry? The answer to that question is (as said by multiple Beaverton School District Counselors), "People should have a well rounded education behind them". This could be translated as, "People should have a load of useless knowledge in their heads so that nothing actually important can take up space" or "You learn what we tell you to learn". Yes, chemistry would be important for a would-be chemist, chemistry teacher, or someone who wanted to be in pharmaceuticals to know. But everyone?

In other words, the educational system does not adequately prepare you for college, a future career, or life in general. The system is inflexible and not designed for  students to succeed in the long term. Everyone basically goes through the same curriculum no matter their dreams or talents.

This is the basic path most students take 

with minor changes based on student choice.

Curriculum that is standardized such as this is doomed to failure. When someone starts taking all these core classes for seven years straight without any clue of why they are doing it, they can only begin to ponder if it is a waste of time. This is why so many people enter careers they are unhappy about, are conflicted about majors in college, or drop out of high school; the standards are neither personalized to the student or give the students an accurate idea of what they want to do. If students were to become involved in a more intense career exploration early in middle school, by the time they reached high school they would know what their talents were and what they were interested in, or enjoyed doing. In turn, they could form a personalized education that would allow them to study a particular field of work that they would enjoy. I truly believe something to this extent is worth a try.

Strictly speaking, the schools should not expect that signing a poster will keep students from dropping out. A new form of education that is personalized to the student is needed. The standard one size fits all does not work.