Excerpt from "OFF THE RECORD"

Eugene Graduation Ceremony

by Bruce Anderson

THE EUGENE GRADUATION CEREMONY was held in a large auditorium called the Hults Center jammed to the balconies with a crowd of 4,000 or so people looking on at some 450 graduates. South Eugene High School is said to be the best high school in town of the half-dozen or so in the area. The school people who gave speeches during the ceremonies made several miffed references to a recent article in Newsweek magazine that left South Eugene High off a list of America's best high schools. Given the speeches of administrators and a couple of teachers I could see why South Eugene didn't make the cut, and that was before the diplomas were passed out. As each grad was announced to receive his or hers, the three school people taking turns to do the honors mispronounced a full one-quarter of the names, including that of Yusra Adi. (A real tongue twister, eh?) For all their declarations of love and dedication -- both words long dead from misapplication but still abused round the clock throughout the land -- the school people hadn't even taken the elementary step of phonetically writing out the troublesome names before the ceremony.

BUT BEFORE they embarrassed themselves with serial surname gaffes, there was a lot of blah-blah about how smart and generally wonderful the graduates and their parents were, as the administrators who weren't at the podium looked anxiously over their shoulders at a beach ball being tossed among the massed matriculators behind them. The rhetoric from the administrators, consistent with today's prevalent edu-shamelessness and the low standards of public speech from shore to blighted shore, implied that the faculty, administration and the massed parents, relatives, guardians, keepers, care providers, and miscellaneous molesters were equivalently smart and generally wonderful to have produced so many smart and generally wonderful students. It was delightful to watch one kid do a fine break dance-like series of creative dance steps rather than walk up to receive his diploma. Another kid cartwheeled up to the School Guy to get his, two others did tandem belly slides, and another grabbed his diploma and the school guy simultaneously in a bear hug, lifting School Guy up off the floor. For a thrillingly expectant moment I thought the kid might toss School Guy into the orchestra pit. Unfortunately, the kid put School Guy down and, jubilant, strode off stage, evidently very, very happy to at last be free of the place.

SOUTH EUGENE HIGH SCHOOL, incidentally, is the usual medium security prison-looking place, but self-contained for that essential central control and monitoring that is the full-time occupation (and pre-occupation) of school administrators. The school consists of a continuous stretch of structure resembling a giant intestine set in the middle of a huge, barren tract as if clear fields of fire were its primary siting consideration, the whole length of it painted a truly hideous, vivid purple. Only a true lunatic could have designed the place, and only a double lunatic its color.

AMERICA'S architectural deterioration over the last hundred years can be tracked by school architecture alone. What schools looked and felt like to the young people confined to them used to be absolutely crucial to Americans; no more. Today's schools are an aesthetic fist in the face that express only fear of the people processed inside of them. South Eugene is Eugene's best high school, apparently a consensus opinion, and relative to what nobody I asked seemed to know. Eugene doesn't have open enrollment, apparently, because the prole school down the street from where we stayed looked like an ongoing jail break. As the young scholars from this obviously hopeless educational enterprise hit the streets to pound down diabetes burgers and serial quarts of liquid tooth-rot to boombox tunes heavy on rape and mayhem lyrics, the girls were totally floozied-out in neo-hooker togs while the boys shuffled along looking like mobile laundry bags, their trousers falling down to expose their droopy drawers, the whole presentation, sartorial and human, appearing weighted as if by unattended loads of turds. These kids were on their own, obviously, and whatever went on in their classrooms it probably didn't have much to do with survival in a class-bound, high tech, half-nuts society.