Show teens value of occasional formality

What? No senior prom? Can they do that?

In schools that have canceled or discussed canceling that hallowed event, it is not only the short-changed seniors who produce outraged squeals. Parents who remember their own proms imperfectly, or who remember not having had them, possibly because it was fashionable to boycott them, have also chimed in:

“They’ve worked hard all year. They deserve to have some fun.”

“Come on – they’ve been dreaming about this for years. It’s something they’ll always remember.”

“You can’t take that away. It’s an American tradition.”

These sentiments are up against two arguments – that proms are expensive and that they are dangerous.

Now that proms have frozen into a pattern that involves restaurant meals and fancy car rentals, there is pressure on those whose families can ill afford such luxuries. And since liquor manages to ooze into the occasion despite a variety of civic and parental precautions, proms are tragically associated with accidents and fatalities.

These two opposing sides leave Miss Manners as the only person taking up the question of high school proms in social terms. Her objections to it are that the prom has become crass and that it serves as a training ground for even crasser weddings.

What do you say to that, kids?

What they say is, “So what? It’s just supposed to be fun.” And then their adult defenders ask what on earth she expects from teenagers – that they should behave like little social climbers, heaven forbid?

Heaven forbid. But that is exactly what they are doing.

High school proms were never exactly decorous. The idea was to assume the privileges of grown-ups, as they had personally observed them. They actually assumed – can you imagine? – that the lives of their parents were more fun than their own.

Being grown-up is no longer a state to which anyone seems to aspire. Not even grown-ups. Any glamour that may have been attached to it has disappeared in the increasing freedoms and prevailing styles of youth.

And so the pattern for that anachronistic institution, the prom, is taken from the lives of pop celebrities – the suddenly enriched who go wild with their appearances and behavior.

It would indeed be wonderful if high school seniors had a chance to sample the real pleasures of formality that are missing from compulsively casual modern life. Variety of style, even if it was no more elaborate than “Sunday best” or “company manners,” was pleasurable. That there is still a craving for occasional formality is evident on the two such occasions left for it – the prom and the wedding. It would be nice if the older generation could show them what it really is.