These days, graduation presents mostly come in envelopes. My first stop on this US trip was at the bank, to get some crisp (AmE) bills/(BrE) banknotes to slip into cards for the two nephews as well my niece, who has a freshly minted BSc in Economics. (If you've read The Prodigal Tongue, you've met her before. She was the niece who had things to say about British bacon.)
High school graduation parties are generally not held in England—partly because there one does not graduate from high school. Graduation is only for those who get a degree from a university. But even when people graduate with a degree, family parties like this are not common. Generally, Americans do a lot more of this kind of party-throwing and gift-giving to mark life transitions (and help out a bit). See the earlier post about showers.
Meanwhile, my 16-year-old (aka Grover) has recently finished secondary school in England. (Her secondary school, as it happens and unusually for England, has high school in its name.) Before school finished, she took 27 exams over 6 weeks in 9 subjects—this is what's known as the GCSEs (General Certificate[s] of Secondary Education). (NB: Many of the educational issues that come up here have been described in previous blog posts—rather than clicking on each link here, you might want to save your efforts for the 'related posts' links below.) Grover won't know her results in those exams till late August, when she'll be able to enrol(l) in the sixth-form college that's accepted her. (Though she's accepted to the college, she won't know until she has her exam results whether she's met the prerequisites for the A-level subjects she's chosen.)
Her status has been difficult to explain to her American family. Sixth-form college is not what Americans think of as college, which would be called university in BrE. In England, sixth-form (and many other diverse things!) counts as further education—after secondary school, but not degree-level study. In an effort to translate her status, she's started telling Americans that she's graduated. Her reasoning for this is that (a) they had a little ceremony in an assembly on their last day of school, (b) she's going to something called college, and (c) she's had a prom (an imitation of the American tradition for these younger students). But since she doesn't even know whether she's passed her exams,* it can't really be counted as "graduating", can it? I have suggested to her that she may be misrepresenting her situation. She doesn't mind. It might yet pay off...
What she is, in Britain, is a school leaver. Instead of getting a mortar board and gown, she got a (orig. BrE) hoodie. (Pic here from an Etsy shop. Grover's hoodie is back in Brighton.)
*Oh, I'm sure she's passed. Whether she's got the prerequisite grades is another matter, so it's all a bit stressful.
So, I want to say: Congratulations to our BA English Language and Linguistics and BA English Language and Literature graduates of 2024! Here's the outfit you didn't get to see me wear.
Related posts:
Types of schools and school years
(the one that's linked-to a LOT above!)
Posts
Good luck Grover!
ReplyDeleteI remember, many years ago, when the results were (physically) posted out to us (UK). This was back in the days of O-levels and A-levels, before GCSEs fused the old O-levels (GCEs) and CSEs. I was on holiday, so in my case they were posted to me care of the local post office and I went there to collect them.
From 40+ years later, I don't remember it being a worry about how well I'd done, but memory is an odd thing.
I remember watching, I think Boyhood, the film, and the graduation party there, and that being totally bewildering to me. I've consumed enough American media that I know you have graduations at what I consider inappropriate times, but that's fine. But the extended "every comes to a party and gives you money" was really alien.
Back in my day (late sixties), sixth-form colleges were less a thing and you stayed at your secondary school to take A-levels. And after taking O-levels, there was the opposite of a graduation ceremony. Basically, nothing more for you to do, don't come to school. (Although I have memories of working in the school library for a while.) After A-levels, I got a job working on a local park, and when my results arrived, my mother came round with the news.
ReplyDeleteWe did have something called speech day, which was an evening in the autumn, and those of us who got O and A-levels got given book tokens in advance. Chose books, hand them to the school, who then put bookplates in them and you got them back at the prize-giving.
Incidentally, my degree ceremony was much more formal. Degree presented by minor royalty, organ music, afternoon tea.
DeleteI'm amused by the coloured gowns you see in US films. It was black for me, with a green hood, University of Leeds colours. Also, no mortar boards for men, but we were leant one for the official photograph.
My recollection is that after finishing our O-levels, several of us went to the pub that was conveniently across the street from the school. I would have been 15 at the time, I think.
DeleteThanks for this post! I've been thinking about the concept of high school graduation, which was alien to me as a product of the Scottish educational system, and this post really clarifies things. (Tho of course the Scottish system isn't precisely analogous to either of your examples).
ReplyDeleteI live in Finland now, where the system is in *some* ways like the American, at least in having the concept of high school graduation.
I've tried to explain to Finns that nobody graduates from high school in Scotland, but somehow those conversations always end in mutual confusion. I think they come away with the impression that it's just a difference of terminology, but it really isn't (just as with the American and English differences you cite)
The differences can be potentially very confusing. For instance, I was surprised to read, in this New York Times article about the Scottish author Douglas Stuart, that he was "the first person in his family to graduate from high school":
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/books/douglas-stuart-shuggie-bain.html
Since nobody graduates from Scottish high schools, I honestly can't think what is meant by the phrase used by the NYT. Perhaps that he was the first to attend for the minimum compulsory number of years of secondary schooling? But that alone is nothing like graduation, since it doesn't require any qualifications (you could fail every class you had for the minimum 4 years you were there) nor does it bestow a qualification or certificate.
High school graduation does confer a qualification—a high school diploma—and you cannot graduate high school without taking and passing a certain set of courses (varies according to state, jurisdiction). There might also the a requirement to have a minimum GPA/overall grade average? So it's very possible to attend high school for 4 years and not graduate—some students take an extra year, or complete high school at a later date as adults (a GED), or just never complete it. You can also leave high school without completing/graduating (I think where I grew up, you were allowed to do this after age 16, with parents' permission, or after age 18). So especially in more disadvantaged areas/communities, it's not uncommon for students not to graduate high school.
DeleteThanks for the comments so far! I've added a PS to congratulate the students whose graduation I missed this year...
ReplyDeleteThat costume looks like something out of Star Trek.
DeleteI recall there were people similarly dressed at my degree ceremony. And back in 1995, I got invited to Arthur C. Clarke receiving an honorary degree at Liverpool University. All the university officials in costume reminded me of the characters from Terry Pratchett's Unseen University.
^university sorry! Am on phone in a very hot motorhome!
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't sound right.
ReplyDeleteI recall for me in 1969 I had interviews at a number of universities and the universities made offers of what A-level results you needed to get accepted. If you didn't get the required results, you didn't get accepted.
But things were different in those days. Often the offers were almost meaningless. I think Leeds wanted me to get two grade E results, i.e. I just had to pass two of the three exams I was taking. I think I got two A's and a C.
At another university, one of the staff explained that they give low offers to students they really want and they expect to do much better that the grades required. "But sometimes we ask for two E's and the student actually just gets that."
What about the grammar around graduation?
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone in Britain still insist on the university being the subject and the student the object? "The university graduates you!" sounds like a Yakov Smirnoff joke and even "...was graduated from..." nowadays sounds as clunky as the announcement of a royal baby.
At the other end, would you say it's no longer non-standard in AmE to drop the "from" i.e. "I graduated college"?
It's been a while since I heard anyone insisting on the university being the subject—but I've no doubt there are people who still do. These things die slowly!
Delete'Graduated college' comes up about half as often as 'graduated from college' in the US portion of the News on the Web corpus. That's pretty common, and it's in published news, so it seems to be not so non-standard these days.
I'm trying to think of any context in British English in which anyone would use 'graduate' as a transitive verb. I'm willing to be corrected, but so far I haven't been able to think of one. The normal usage is that a student graduates 'from' a University 'in' a subject. The subject is definitely the student, not the University. A person also describes themselves as a graduate (noun) 'of' somewhere, again 'in' a subject. Universities etc 'give' or more pompously 'confer' degrees on people.
ReplyDeleteCuriously, there was a story in the press recently of a parent who had been allowed to graduate many years ago but not allowed to attend his degree ceremony because of a dispute between him and his University over money outstanding for damage to lodging which they said he was responsible for and he said he wasn't. His son was due to graduate from the same University this year. After a chat with the University the University agreed to waive the claim, and the father was allowed to attend the degree ceremony with his son and have his degree formally conferred upon him. There was, though, no question that the father had been recognised as a graduate throughout the intervening years. It was only the ceremony that had been denied him.