The Power of Graduation

Last Monday, on my way home from the beach, I stopped by my grandfather's house to help him with some chores. He is 87 now and while he still thinks that he can do everything, he probably shouldn't. While I was there he mentioned that he recently had his high school reunion. I had always heard there were some strange circumstances surrounding him finishing school, so I took the opportunity to get the whole story. It goes like this...

My grandfather was a dropout. Not just that, but he finally dropped out of school at 16 because he was still in the 7th grade. As the oldest son of tenant farmers, he often missed school to work in the tobacco fields and this led to him being held back numerous times. At 16, he just stopped going altogether. That year, a man that went to his church, who was a principal at another school, told him that he would help him study over the summer and would help him get back into school the next fall. My grandfather agreed to this and worked every night at this man's house. The next year, the man told him to go back to school and join the class of kids that were his age. That fall he entered Lucama School in the 12th grade. A couple of weeks later, his school records caught the attention of his principal. My grandfather explained the situation and asked him to talk to the other principal that helped him. Two weeks later he was told he could stay. The principal even purchased him a class ring. My grandfather paid him back at the end of the year with tobacco money after he graduated. After high school he joined the Army and fought in the Korean War. He came home to Kinston and got a job at Dupont and worked there for the next 30 years.

Can you just imagine the chatter among the teaching staff at learning about the kid that was just pushed through from 7th to 12th grade! Weren't there any standards? Wasn't this just social promotion? I'm sure they thought that school must just be pushing kids through with no regard to what they actually learned. It's the same things we say today, but that was 70 years ago. To be honest, kids today graduate with the highest set of standards in American history in regards to graduation requirements. It doesn't always feel that way when we see a kid that doesn't do much to earn that walk on the stage at the end of the year.

Since high school, no one has ever asked me my class rank or my high school GPA. Once the moment of graduating happens, life is all about what you do next. It's what you do with that opportunity. You have a chance to build a life and it can be better or worse than the one you had before. The principal that helped my grandfather saw a young man struggling to help his family. He must have known how poor they were and how they moved from place to place, each smaller than the last, to make ends meet. He must have known about the social issues in their home that still plague homes in poverty today.

Without graduating, it is very likely that my grandfather would have continued as a tenant farmer; poor and uneducated. Graduating high school gave him a shot at a better life and while it may have been unethical to put him in the 12th grade, it made him better and society better. My mom, his daughter, went on to be the valedictorian of her high school class. My grandfather had adopted a respect for the power of education that did not exist in his family before him and he pushed that on his children. It was pushed on me as well.

In one week the chairs will be set out and the tassels will be hanging from caps as eager high school students prepare to leave us. Some worked very hard and some not very much at times. Some are gifted and some are not. Once that diploma hits their hands, they all become equal with an opportunity to be whatever they want to be. They have a chance. That is the power of graduation.