Why do we call it commencement?
Now I know the presumed point: Learning is over and doing is about to commence; training is over and life is about to start. But what does that say about education? Is learning not doing? Is school pre-life? No wonder kids think so little of it when we tell them life begins when you get out.
I remember Meet-the-Teacher Night in the second grade with my first child. The teacher was going over the Rules of Engagement. As first-child parents, we were taking notes lest we fail.
She ran the classroom with high expectations, she said, because there will be no excuses when they get into the real world. That would be the world of industry, I gathered, some 20 years at least into my child’s future!
So the classroom is the unreal world? Or the less real world?
Maybe we owe this in part to the church. In ancient times when new converts were joining the church, they were put into a training program that would lead to baptism. Until baptism, they were dismissed from worship at a certain point, so that the initiated could then share Communion.
They called that moment “the mass,” which from the Latin meant “to go forth” or “to exit.” The masses exited en masse. Until their training was complete, new Christians were unable to participate in the really real world of Communion with God.
Gradually, the phrase “mass” evolved to mean the sending forth of the people of God into the world after participation in the Communion event. Once the real world of life with God has been enacted in the school of grace, the people of God could then go into the unreal world of commerce and commence their work for God.
Better, but still not there yet. The real world can be whatever world we are living in at any moment if it is filled with God’s presence and our attention to it. Thus, young people who are studying and thinking are doing just the same as engineers who are designing bridges and construction crews who are laying asphalt and clergy who are presiding at the Lord’s Table.
Learning is doing. Training is life, not preparation for life.
The converse, too, is true. Life is training, since the promise of more to come begs that we learn from each moment along the way. We can learn by doing. One hopes. That we have laboratory time set up during our first quarter of life should only reinforce the value of lifelong learning.
If everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten, why not have commencement then and get on with real life at age 5?
