High school and college commencements have already begun, cause for celebrations and congratulations for thousands of students.

But preceding the season of graduations is another celebratory season, that of honors ceremonies.

Over the years, we have attended several hundred honor ceremonies of assorted types at assorted educational institutions.

Sometimes, as we hear accomplishment cited and watch certificates being handed out, we ask ourselves, "Is getting awards and recognitions while so young a good thing? Will the recipients take their talents and awards for granted as they enter the wider world?

But there is no empirical evidence, in students I have watched grow up and engage in the real world, that they have been spoiled by success. They have simply made remarkable records for themselves in their course work and in their activities, records worthy of milestone-type praise along their way.

Another question I ponder at these ceremonies is this: "Can these touted students use their awarded abilities for the betterment of the human race? Will these young leaders accept responsibilities that are required of leaders?"

We feel, rather strongly, that receiving academic and service honors in school days carries with it an authentic obligation for their society and for others. Honors go to students who dare to think and to take risks, students who cherish creativity and curiosity and contrariness, imagination and initiative and intellect, students who are clearly at the head of their class, students who form what Thomas Jefferson and John Adams called a "natural aristocracy." While believing passionately that "all men are created equal," Jefferson favored a system of education in which the best and brightest rose to the top, training to become elite leaders who with their virtues would replace the Founding Fathers and renew the Republic generation after generation. But Jefferson lived to see his natural aristocracy slipping away.

Jacksonian democracy expanded the middle class at the expense of the educated class, and James Fenimore Cooper fretted over that. Asked, "What then do you deem our greatest error -- our weakest point?", Cooper replied: "Provincialisms, with their train of narrow prejudices, and a disposition to set up mediocrity as perfection."

In France, Alexis de Tocqueville made the same point: "A middling standard is fixed in America for human knowledge." The idea of a "common man" leaves little room for uncommon ones. The danger for a democracy is in reducing its people to some lowest common denominator. People are alike in birth and in death, in their legal and human rights, in their political rights, and in their rights to equal opportunities. But they are not alike in their interests, in their abilities, or in their intelligence.

We need uncommon leaders to lift the fates and visions of the common people; we need meritorious leaders to wage war on mediocrity. American culture has been gobbled up by mounting waves of cultural mediocrity, the kudzu of the mind. Getting and spending and self-gratification are the driving forces of our times, and swept by those irresistible forces, the cultural refinements of civilization have been diminished.

Whence will come leaders able to color outside the lines of race, of poverty, of sickness, of crime, and of energy and environment? Who will color into our society symphony orchestras, art galleries, poetry, books, operas, bilingualism, and meaningful conversations?

Such creative honors students are harder and harder to find, because we settle invisibly and comfortably for "a middling standard." Honor entails obligation. You can't frame your duty and hang it on the wall. You have to enact it, live it, and breathe it. We need to replenish the leadership blood of the nation.