Graduation

For a long time, I thought that big graduation ceremonies and such were reserved for high school and college graduations. Those marked major milestones and/or major accomplishments. When I first heard about kindergarten graduations, I rolled my eyes. I didn't think that completing the first year of the American public education system deserved any special recognition.

I didn't get a kindergarten graduation ceremony.

My problem was the source of the idea for kindergarten graduation ceremonies: building a child's self-esteem. I don't want to make anybody think that self-esteem is bad or unnecessary, but I noticed the trend of kindergarten graduation during a time in which the self-esteem movement had many followers. People--parents, teachers, mental health professionals, family therapists, and many others--claimed that a positive self-esteem is so absolutely vital to a child's well-being and ability to grow up without becoming a serial murderer that everything had to have a positive spin. No more keeping score in sports, no more honor rolls listing the top achievers, easier assignments, more praise. I even heard that one teacher regularly responded to incorrect answers from her students by saying, "Well, that's the right answer to a different question." I found this movement absurd. A child who does not deal with childhood disappointments and failures will not grow up knowing how to deal with adulthood disappointments and failures.

I assumed that kindergarten graduations were part of the self-esteem thing, and it's likely that they were, but I have changed my opinion of them.

In some other "first world" and "developing" nations with compulsory education, the children perform better in nearly all subjects than American children do. Researchers propose that a major cause for this disparity has to do with culture. All children in all schools have to learn some difficult subjects, and few will report that school is always easy. But some have a different attitude toward it than others, and the attitude is usually that engendered by the adults in their lives.

In Russia, the first day of each school year is a national holiday, and it is customary for each child to bring flowers to his or her teacher. In another Asian country, children wear yellow hats on their first day of school, are escorted to the school by their parent(s), and are welcomed to the school by the older children. I've heard of schools in which children are rewarded with honey dropped on a writing tablet so that "learning becomes sweet" to them. In Jewish cultures, the most educated are the most revered; to be wealthy was good, but to be wise was better, as evidenced in Fiddler on the Roof when the lead character stated that he would like to be rich so he could spend his time studying scripture.

In America, we take our kids clothes shopping and plan what we're going to do when they have a vacation. We place more emphasis on sports or performance prowess than on learning. School and studying are viewed as means to an end, as unpleasant chores, almost as necessary evils.

Perhaps kindergarten graduation ceremonies, if they are used as a way of celebrating school and learning and not as a joyous escape from burdensome labor, can help us recapture the love of learning that should exist in childhood.