The first baccalaureate ceremony took place at Oxford in 1432. Each student was required to deliver a sermon in Latin. (You thought a few speeches was bad!). Diplomas were originally made of sheepskin, rolled and tied with ribbon. Gowns were originally required academic attire (uniforms).

I know I'm not the only one who feels that the high school students we send out into the world at 18 are hardly prepared for the responsibilities of an adult. We continue to coddle them for some years beyond, as they go to school and either live in (semi-)supervised dorms or remain at home until they can make it on their own. Somehow, our society does not require the maturity that others demand by necessity at a much earlier age. Such a long period of adolescence can have its own costs, as a certain number lose their way. For example, some argue that, denied the opportunity to perform certain rites of passage, young men will be attracted to gangs as an alternative.

On the other hand, what we may be lacking now is a coherent tradition to hand on to the next generation. High school graduation ceremonies are associated with underage drinking and sexual escapades. Marriage rituals have lost meaning because of previous live-in arrangements or the fragility of the bonds themselves. The traditions around childbirth can be fragmented when the baby is born out of wedlock and the parents and relatives are still trying to find their roles. Our secular rituals and expectation fall short for the larger questions the adolescent must face on the gateway to the adult world.

A folklorist, wrote a very interesting piece about folk traditions associated with rites of passage. He explored the traditions of fiddlers in different stages of their lives. Their fiddling careers were very much in harmony with the roles they played at different stages in their lives. An art was meant to be learned when young and taken up again later after the heavy work of raising children had been accomplished.

According to him, the traditional fiddler's life follows the same course. A child learns the instrument from his parents; or he plays it as a young man and then puts it away when he settles down to raise a family. When his children are grown, the fiddle becomes part of his life once again. Jabbour writes that, although each of the fiddlers he interviewed had his own reasons for quitting, the pattern was unmistakable. By the time Jabbour had heard thirty different versions of the story from fiddlers in the Upper South, he began to realize that something bigger and more fundamental was going on. "I was not simply finding a few [older fiddlers] who still played. Rather I was learning that old age was precisely when one played the fiddle." As Mary Hufford and Marjorie Hunt summarize, "The implications are astonishing. Fiddling, clogging, carving, and needlework, then, are not dying arts just because their practitioners are elderly. They are, in fact, the things that elderly people do."