My son finishes eighth grade next week, and I was all set to write a column questioning the need for eighth-grade graduation. My initial impulse was to scoff. “It’s eighth grade! Doesn’t everybody graduate?” But then I started thinking about it in a different way, less as an academic achievement and more as a coming-of-age ceremony, a la bar and bat mitzvahs, quinceaneras, rumspringa, etc.
Nonreligious American boys don’t really have a ceremony to mark their entrance into adulthood. You don’t hear about boys having a sweet-16 party or a “coming out” as a Southern debutante might. It got me wondering what types of coming-of-age ceremonies do exist around the world for boys, so I did a bit of research.
In the Brazilian Amazon, young boys wear gloves woven through with live bullet ants for 10 minutes in a ceremony when they turn 13. Enduring the pain is supposed to demonstrate the boys’ readiness for manhood.
Inuit boys have traditionally gone into the wilderness with their fathers between ages 11 and 12 to test their hunting skills and acclimatize to the bitter weather. Young girls now participate in this as well.
Masai boys in Kenya and Tanzania sleep outside in the forest the night before a ceremony the next morning during which they drink a concoction of alcohol, cow’s blood and milk. Then they are circumcised. If they flinch during the procedure, they bring shame upon their family.
In Ethiopia, grooms-to-be jump naked over a castrated male cow four times, symbolizing the childhood they are leaving behind.
Boys in Vanuatu, a small island nation in the South Pacific, jump from a 98-foot-tall tower with vines (not flexible bungees) tied to their ankles. A miscalculation can result in broken bones or even death.
Rumspringa is the Amish coming-of-age for boys and girls. When an Amish youth turns 16, he is free to break the typical Amish traditions and try out all the joys and ills of Western culture: clothing, alcohol, cigarettes, movies, cars and more. Then he must make a decision whether to be baptized in the Amish church or stay out in the wider world. The majority of them choose to return to the church and live their lives in the Amish community.
Then there’s the bar mitzvah, with which many of us are more familiar. At age 13, in order to demonstrate their faith, boys become accountable for their actions and responsible for following Jewish law. An elaborate party typically marks the bar mitzvah, with relatives and friends celebrating the boy’s journey toward becoming a responsible adult.
I’m certainly glad my son doesn’t have to wear bullet-ant gloves, leap over a cow or demonstrate any other “manly” tests of strength, but the idea of celebrating his ascent into manhood is a nice one. Of course, “manhood” really happens in stages. There’s not one age at which you suddenly become an adult. In fact, many grownups don’t feel like adults. Assigning an arbitrary age to this transition is a bit strange, but the notion of recognizing and honoring a child as he or she enters this transitional stage – still half-kid with a toe in the pool of adulthood – is beautiful.
For many, middle school is one of the most difficult trials on our journey toward adulthood. First of all, there’s puberty to deal with. Combine that with strict rules, grueling classes, parental expectations, kids with beards roaming the halls alongside kids with sweet baby faces, curiosity about the opposite sex, 6-foot-tall girls, and slightly more but not quite enough freedom, and you’ve got a complicated two or three years on your hands.
So while the completion of middle school may not be much of an academic milestone, it does signify the end of that hazy middle ground between childhood and the older teenage years, and opens the doors to high school, where we all hope our children will truly thrive and achieve the graduation that matters more.
Contact the writer: Twitter: @heatherskylerhskyler@ocregister.comheatherskyler.com
