There’s something so youthful and promising about June. It’s because our social calendars converge with satisfying relief with the academic graduation dates. In Bahrain, graduation is a family affair (like most things) and uncles, aunts and cousins join parents and siblings to surround the graduating student for the mandatory selfies and photos that social media demands these days for every milestone to be recognised as reality.
Our own children having long flown the coop, we watch indulgently from the sidelines as younger parents toff up for the big day and pictures of the smartly turned out boys and impeccably coiffed girls flash past our fB walls in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of hope and ambition.
Most expat children step off the graduation stage to universities in other countries, to new and independent lives where they learn to negotiate academics and new social and emotional freedom and responsibilities that will eventually shape them.
Even those who choose to study in Bahrain feel the new weight of emerging adulthood and despite the continuing protection of their parents and the luxury of having their laundry folded for them, they have to manage new dimensions in their relationships, their awareness of careers beckoning for which they have to prepare. Yes, it is a graduation indeed and one that is worthy of celebration.
And then the students graduate from college. You have inspiring speeches by well-known personalities and your child steps into the world as a brand-new person, barely equipped to change it but oh-so-achingly determined to do so!
This is a graduation of parents and child and a new template is put in place for the future, where, if the parents are wise, they will treat this new adult with respect and be ready to guide them, but only when asked ... and ready with the band aid for their bruises as they pick themselves up from the knocks they get as they learn and grow.
There is a third kind of graduation though, and I find it ersatz and irritating. I’m talking about the flood of kindergarten and Class One graduations that will soon flood our newspapers and social media. Just what has anybody achieved in this moving from one class to another that it should be labelled a ‘graduation’?
In my time and even in my children’s days, the kids counted down the last five days of school, cut a farewell cake in class and rushed home that afternoon, tearing off their uniform for the summer holiday months. There was none of this drama over having learnt a couple of rhymes and the alphabet, which would only be reinforced in the next class.
This new-fangled trend for kindergarten graduation – why, even some playschools announce the end of the year with a graduation! – is really all about parents wanting to be convinced that they are good parents and the schools obliging with an eye on commercial interest and not really about the children. It matches the eager devotion with which first birthdays are celebrated. The birthday child is completely unaware of the reason for the fuss and it’s all about the parents and their friends actually.
Schools and parents should stop cultivating this over-inflated sense of achievement for themselves and the children after a paltry eight months in an over-decorated classroom. That same effort, if spent on teaching manners and values, would do everybody a world of good.
meeraresponse@yahoo.com