A Promise to Grads With ‘No Promise’

It’s high school graduation season. Time to cheer the teenage achievers (especially the overachievers) and send them off to campus adventures and incipient adulthood. This year, though, I want to talk about the other graduates. The ones without honor society stoles or academic medals or college plans. The ones who still don’t know what they could or should do, who taste a tinny dread when the band strikes up “Pomp and Circumstance.”

I’m talking about students who flailed academically, never discovered any particular talent, drifted unnoticed in the halls. The kids who got into trouble and now think of trouble as their natural habitat. The poor kids, the dwellers in volatile homes, the abusers of substances. The college rejects and even the high school dropouts.

If I could give all those kids a graduation gift, it would be this plain but important truth: Everything can still be fine. Not easy, necessarily, but fine. This is almost certainly true, no matter what seemingly hopeless mess they have made of their affairs or bleak vision they’ve developed of their abilities and future. Virtually all American 18-year-olds have more options and more time than they’ve been led to believe. Teenagers’ biographies (whether promising or ominous) should not be interpreted as dispositive proof of years to come.

This is clear to me now, having lived long enough to watch old friends rebound from seemingly ruined lives to happy, stable and prosperous adulthoods, and on the other end, noticing that some of my most promising classmates fizzled out on contact with the world beyond our little town. There are plenty of kids, of course, who turn out more or less the way you’d expect. But the whole process strikes me as infinitely less predictable than suggested by the mechanical churn and sort of the K-12 assembly line.

I’m not in denial. It’s a tough world. Turning things around — changing one’s trajectory — is difficult and daunting. Factors beyond our control, like economic class, race and lack of family support, can pile on extra disadvantages. Even the happiest endings are usually preceded by times when it all looks too hard and hopeless. And people do, tragically, fall through the cracks.

Still, young people should be told — and should believe — that their destiny is not shaped in high school. Their personalities are still coming together in the tissues of the brain; time is on their side, and (say what you want about Americans) we like underdogs, cheer come-from-behind wins and are generous with second chances.