Graduations...should they be banned?

I've been to four Los Angeles Public School graduations over the past ten days, everything from grammar school to high school and I learned a lot of what our future may be together with the good and bad stuff that may be coming up the canal. I'd point out that back in the day there was no doubt that the public schools in the LA area were vastly superior to the private schools, mainly because of the clear money advantage the public schools enjoyed, an advantage that assured things like chemistry labs would be as well equipped as a NASA base today. The post WWII generation demanded and got dam good schools. And now, as in the olden days, wherever the public schools are really good whites will generally send their kids to them, not just for the education but for the experiences like proms, football, field trips and so on together with the community involvement. The teachers are good and the results show.

First, the really good. I went to the high school graduation of a 3,000 kid high school outside of Los Angeles (Conejo Valley District) that is a throw back to the fifties. This school had furnished the community with a state football championship and a CIF championship too. The parents are all middle to upper middle class, the kids were 95% white, everyone was goal oriented AND knew they would have to work their asses off to accomplish whatever it was they wanted. The message from this white high school was hope for the future. They saw opportunity, the chance to make the world better, and knew they'd accomplish things. No fights, no "poor poor me" bullshit from minorities and women and no hating the government. This was "normal." The adult conversation afterward was "what percent of the kids would go on to college?" We all agreed that if Junior College counted it would be 100%.

Now the perturbing. A grammar school graduation in a upper middle to high income neighborhood with a racial mix of Asian, Hispanic, white....and a very few blacks. Again, the message was hope for their future but without the determination to put their noses to the grindstone in order to achieve. There were apparently some good athletes in the mix because many of the boys expressed the dream of athletic success. The perturbing part of the ceremony was the extent of the politicization of the entire class and school curriculum. Global Warming was mandatory and no deviation was tolerated at all. The faculty and parents were shoving this "environmental" religion down the throats of their willing kids. The ceremony was nice but not all that inspiring; more cute than anything else and had no improvisational feel. It was all scripted and the kids followed the script.

Next there was a "middle school" graduation that included all kinds of demonstrations of accomplishments and student activity. Included was a performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream (a stretch and a half for thirteen year olds), some very complex science experiments that included flight, and some crafts that were really cool. Most interesting was a demonstration centrifuge that showed how uranium was enriched which a parent involved in nuclear physics supervised. The ceremony itself was brief because the concentration was on the accomplishments of the kids. The interesting thing for me was that the kids themselves were selling refreshments, taking in the money and making change, and controlling demand WITHOUT armed guards standing around fearing robbery. Again the class was 95% white with almost no blacks. These students will probably go to their local high school which is not in LA Unified and does not have black "culture" dominating what is taught and learned.

Last was a metro LA middle school where the daughter of one of our employees was graduating, and this was a near horror story. Almost all black with a tiny sprinkling of Hispanics and you cannot imagine the low accomplishment level of the kids, especially when compared to the other schools I'd been to. The speakers were bitter and combative, assuming the government was rotten as was the society as a whole. It was a very bitter experience. I noted that the teachers were black, the administrators ditto, and there were armed guards spread around, mostly to be sure that the refreshment money wasn't stolen and because of the fear that gang bangers would loot the cars in the parking lots. The so-called goals of the mostly black students ranged from the inconsequential to the hallucinatory. Very depressing. There was no doubt, at least in my mind, that the accomplishment level when compared to the mostly white schools was a universe behind. I'd venture to opine that far too many of the boys were headed to the gangster life and no determination to actually work to attain long term goals was expressed. Our employee shares the mainly hostile POV toward our society, something I hadn't fully realized.

I'd say that the income and race divide is nearly complete and that our society as a whole isn't headed in a better direction because the white high school is far removed from the "integrated" reality of the metro schools. I didn't experience any of the rich white private school graduations because my relatives in the requiring income brackets are all in non-graduating grades this year. Next year I'll be going to graduations in Paris (at the Lourve), Rome, and Athens and the speeches will all be about rigging markets, cooking the books, and sex.