One of the rituals of school life is the annual Kindergarten Graduation. It is a stepping stone for the Senior Class students that they don’t fully understand as yet, a move away from classroom time where play is a dominant feature to classrooms where control and structured logical learning are enforced. But, for now, the Graduation is about them and how they have grown up.
They don’t fully appreciate the emotion and significance of the moment for their parents, who have their eyes glued on their child, holding their breaths that it won’t be their child who messes up, but is the perfect motionless tree! Half of the pleasure of graduation performances is watching the parents. Teachers also age a few years in the two hours or so that it takes to bring down the final curtain. Their effectiveness and credibility as creative dramatists is on the line and in the hands of a group of six-year-olds.
But the graduation ceremony is not only about the graduating students. A supporting cast of Junior and Middle Class students not only bid the seniors goodbye, but showcase what they have learned at the school and thereby encourage parents to continue sending them and simultaneously attract new clientele. It is perhaps a cynical view of things, but in the end everything is about business, especially at private schools like the one at which I teach.
However, the children are blissfully unaware of the marketing strategy in which they are unwittingly a part, and for them it is a heap of fun and, happily, an end to the hours and hours of practice they have had to put in to make their teachers and the school look good!
12 October 2005
Dion Marc Delport