The Audacity of Kindergarten

Today I attended kindergarten graduation for my granddaughter, Alexis. I left feeling a whole lot better than when I arrived.
There were about sixty kids, and about eighty visitors. Average more than one per kid. When Alexis’ parents were in school, visitors’ night usually saw maybe eight parents talking to a teacher who had thirty students. Where were the other fifty-two?
The kids filed in and sat on bleachers, then sang some songs with enthusiasm and reasonable melody. With some difficulty, I managed to take my eyes off Alexis now and then. I saw black kids, white kids, Hispanic kids, Asian kids. A couple had disabilities of one kind or another. The kids obviously didn’t care about any of these differences. They sang and whispered and giggled with whoever was next to them.
The kids got certificates in every subject in which they had scored well enough. English, arithmetic, Spanish, music, spelling…I lost count of the number of subjects but it was a whole lot more than my kindergarten covered. Or my third grade, for that matter. The certificates were not “gimme”prizes because some kids got a lot and some kids only got a few. Alexis got one in every subject, which didn’t surprise me. She is not only smart, she has intellectual curiosity and so far has preserved a view that learning is fun.
I should have said every academic subject, because Alexis didn’t get one of the little trophies for straight As in conduct. Her sincere desire to behave well is not always synched up with her impulse control.
Unfortunately whoever read out the names bobbled the pronunciation. Just about everybody – me for sure -- thought they called "our Alexis" instead of “the other Alexis” who also has a one-syllable surname. So she popped up, went to the table, picked up a trophy, and went back to her seat. Along came the teacher, sat on the floor beside her, and began a long, earnest conversation. Alexis looked a little pensive, but she handed over the trophy and went back to peering around to see Mommy and Daddy. No big deal – stuff happens. It’s good to know she spent this year in the company of a teacher who can handle that situation so skillfully.
These kids are graduating into a world that is better in some ways than the one I graduated into from kindergarten. For example, nobody was wondering today whether society would disappear in a nuclear fireball before these kids got old enough to join it. My parents wondered about that when I graduated. I wondered about when my kids graduated. Some things are better because a lot of my kindergarten pals have worked very hard, and given up a lot, to make them better.
The world is worse in some ways. For example, we didn’t graduate with $35,000 apiece in national debt that would double before we graduated from high school. Our classmates didn’t bring assault rifles to school and kill a bunch of us. We had good odds that Mommy and Daddy would stay around and stay together. These things are worse because lot of my kindergarten pals never grew out of their greed, and arrogance, and self-indulgence, during kindergarten or after.
Watching these kids today, I understood why in the most dismal and cynical of times there is hope. No matter how badly we screw up, or how badly we get screwed, there is another generation coming who may be able to do better than we did.
These kids accept each other, their families show up, they are learning things and have good odds that there will be a world left for them to use that learning in. It’s not just hope that they will do better. It’s a reasonably good bet.