Graduation season is upon us, and it’s such a great time of year to celebrate the innumerable accomplishments of high school and college grads all across the United States.
This year’s extreme weather notwithstanding, May and June are usually very comfortable, so as to accommodate outdoor parties and open houses. In many areas outdoor ceremonies are also possible, which allows for more friends and family to be in attendance.
I have always liked graduation season.
I love the TV montages of commencement speeches made by luminaries and celebrities at colleges and universities. I am duly amused by the photo ops created by students who choose to do back flips or funky dances across the stage as they pick up their diplomas. I admire the creative displays created on mortarboards with artwork and messages of joy that this or that milestone has at last been achieved.
Indeed, graduation is, as the old song by the Four Freshmen goes, “a time for joy, a time for tears, a time we’ll treasure through the years.”
For as long as I can remember it has been repeated that high school graduations are not an end, but a beginning, hence the term commencement used to proclaim the beginning of young peoples’ lives as they enter adulthood, the beginning of college, or a career, or a family.
This important milestone in any young person’s life carries significant weight in terms of effort, motivation, determination and drive. It means having met certain standards of education in preparation for life in the “real world.” It indicates a level of support by parents who built the characters and personalities of their children that allow them to shine with their own lights.
During the last couple of decades we have seen an increase in the number of older adults who are pursuing undergraduate degrees. The ability to return to school in one’s 30s, 40s, 50s and older isn’t so strange an occurrence as it once was. But it is sometimes an even more admirable accomplishment than that of young adults fresh out of high school, because it has been done by men and women who are being retrained for a new work environment while still holding down a job and raising children.
Because I consider graduation to be a benchmark of great significance in our lives, it bothers me more than just a little bit to see the burgeoning of graduation ceremonies for children as they pass from preschool to Kindergarten, Kindergarten to elementary school, sixth grade to junior high, and junior high to high school. (And in some cases from one grade level to the next all along the way!)
To celebrate matriculation through the grades serves to diminish the importance of the grand milestones at the age of majority and beyond.
These intermediary observances become akin to the participation ribbons given to every kid who competes in Field Day events, or a spelling bee, or on any summer sports team. You get special recognition just for being. The ribbon or trophy means nothing more than that you can breathe. Big deal.
Graduation from high school or college, on the other hand, IS a big deal. As a graduating high school senior, one has met the standards of thirteen years of education. As a college grad, one has completed a set number of hours of instruction in a specialized field or fields, preparing one to work in that field having demonstrated a given level of proficiency and competence.
The reason I get up on my high horse on this subject this week is because we went to a year-end celebration of the end of Kindergarten for our older grandson. It wasn’t billed as a graduation, as his move out of preschool had been last year. It was a Kindergarten assembly in which the young ones demonstrated for their families their abilities to sing from memory, in unison, on key, with accompanying gestures and signing, something they couldn’t do at the beginning of the year.
But at other similar events billed as graduations, we have seen young children dressed in miniature caps and gowns marching to Pomp and Circumstance, as if making it from Kindergarten to first grade were an unusual event! It is not!
Most kids, I dare say, matriculate successfully through all twelve grades without so much as a how-do-you-do. It’s getting through high school – fraught with all the perils of socialization, acceptance, cliques, bullies, overactive hormones, teachers who pose unique challenges, extracurricular activities and part-time jobs – that is remarkable, that is worthy of the speeches, special awards and scholarships, as a major rite of passage.
Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t unacceptable to celebrate our children in what they do. What is not acceptable, in my assessment, is to place undue importance on the everyday, run-of-the-mill achievements
So let’s hear it for the Class of 2019! Shoot off the fireworks, strike up the band, and march it all down Main Street for the accolades of the community that remembers its own graduation and all that it meant in their lives!
Bravo! Kudos! Halleluja!
As a middle school classroom teacher, I always felt uncomfortable at over-blown ceremonies at the end of 8th grade.
Graduation from high school is a major event. A commencement. It shouldn’t be diminished by mock graduations through the process. It’s a coming of age rite, a celebration.