Graduations and Celebrating Non-Events

Due to the fact that I am a teacher and a brother to thirteen, I have been to many graduations and frankly I'm fed up with them. Last Tuesday, I had to go to the graduation of the school that I teach at and it was boring. Nothing was said or done that I left feeling like I benefitted from. My brother had a graduation later that night and I told him that I wasn't coming. He didn't mind. He was a good student having done well in many school endeavors. I told him that his graduating was not an accomplishment, it was a milestone. Tim, I said, you are supposed to graduate and if you didn't it would be a colossal failure and completely unacceptable. (Now, I know I run the risk of this sounding rather harsh and I am aware that for some students graduation is an accomplishment. For the academically challenged student graduation is often an accomplishment. For the student who dealt with great challenges in his or her family life, such as the death of a parent or a sibling, or a difficult illness of a family member, graduation may be a great accomplishment. Some kids have had to fight great odds just to stay in the game These are not the students that I am referring to). I am talking about the average student, the one that is supposed to and expected to graduate.

I am not saying that we should do away with high school and college graduations. However, I do not understand why my brother attended several graduation parties with his classmates in the two weeks leading up to graduation. Why has a simple milestone become a long and drawn out production, the perpetual celebration of a minor event? Furthermore, why are we now expecting families to have to sit through kindergarten, 6th grade, and 8th grade graduations? A friend of mine bemoaned the fact of his daughters kindegarten graduation dragging on for three hours last week (the high school one I went to was two hours and that was for over 700 kids). Why are we making non-events events? Maybe we're so desperate as a culture for genuine celebration that we are creating events to celebrate that really aren't worth celebrating? Maybe, we just want to have parties and hey I don't have a problem with that. But, have just that, a party. Why should we pretend to celebrate something that is really not that big of an accomplishment?