Do children really graduate every year?
Posted on Wed, Jun 29, 2011
It's the season of graduations and this always makes me reflective. There's a lot of discussion about whether people make too big a deal about this now. After all, when we grew up, you graduated from high school and then from college and that was it. Today, kids seem to have "graduation" every year. I have come to the conclusion that there's good and bad about this situation (I know, really straddling the fence on this one!).
Let's start with the "bad." I was at a high school graduation a couple weeks ago and during the ceremony, the graduates started throwing beach balls amongst themselves. While I appreciate the instinct to be a bit irreverent, isn't this really just a sign of disrespect? Disrespectful towards the speakers (who had been chosen by the student body) and disrespectful towards the entire concept of the education these students and their families had just completed. Was this perhaps a sign that all the graduations these students had experienced over the years now led them to believe that this one was no big deal? Bear in mind that there were parties going on after the ceremony where the students could "let loose."
Okay, so now let's switch gears and look at a moving-up ceremony for children "graduating" from elementary school to middle school. There was absolutely a big fuss made over these students. They sang, they played "Pomp and Circumstance" as they processed in, there was a video highlighting every child in the grade, and there were multiple photo ops during the ceremony itself. Too much? Well, maybe. But here's the thing: every one of these students knew every other student in their grade and, for them, this really was a momentous occasion and they enjoyed every minute of it. After all, they were the center of the whole affair that day.
I like the idea of marking the significant transitions in some way. For that elementary school, these kids were celebrating each other and the bonds they shared. They will be in an entirely new (and bigger) environment next year with new (and more) people. They deserve some time to reflect on how far they've come and where they're heading.
I don't like the idea of having such ceremonies every single year, though. Class parties? Fine. Going out for ice cream on the last day of school? Fine. Having a special family dinner to celebrate the end of the year? Fine. But let's not get carried away with extravagant ceremonies that include parents, grandparents, siblings, school administrators, and the public at large. Save the "Pomp and Circumstance" for the big transitions, in which children truly enter a whole new phase of their lives.