Tonight the local high school was finally able to hold its commencement for the graduating class of 2020. The young lady who earned the valedictorian honors gave a pretty good speech and the superintendent said some encouraging words to the recent graduates, so it was overall a nice ceremony.
Often I share the opinion that a high school diploma is thought to mean quite a bit more than it does mean and is held in a little higher esteem than it should be. Ideally it's the first achievement in a person's life rather than the high point. But tonight we'll set that idea aside. The young people lost their spring sports, their prom, their awards assemblies and the like. But they got to have their moment, when they moved the tassel and tossed that weird hat in the air and celebrated what, this year more than any, they had slogged their way through.
Good job, grads.
I suspect in the past it was indicative of more than it is now.
ReplyDeleteI had an aunt who left high school before her graduation to marry and have a job. And she knew Latin, and knew some math stuff I didn't know until college. (And I still don't know Latin). And this was a tiny high school in rural Upper Peninsula Michigan, in the late 1930s....
Oh, completely so. And it remains an achievement. I just run into too many people who look at it as the achievement, relegating the idea of advanced degrees, starting families, success in military service or in the workforce, and so on, to afterthoughts.
ReplyDeletePlus, even though there are people who don't graduate it's not like public schools have made it any harder to finish than they have to.