The paper approaches school parades on national commemorations in Greece as a 'text' for storing and transmitting cultural meanings and value hierarchies. The study is based on policy documents and participant observation. The detailed Ministry instructions on how schools should select students for the parade may be viewed as instructions on how to manage dimensions of diversity. Two such dimensions are tallness and achievement, established by law as selection criteria. The latter could point to both intellectual abilities and effort. However, because of the dominance of effort in Greek educational rhetoric, achievement comes to be perceived mainly as an indicator of moral qualities, e.g. hard work. The selected students are distributed along the body of the parade according to 'syntactic' rules, i.e. mainly 'firstness'. Skilful management of bodily and moral 'diversity' makes underlying value hierarchies explicit, thus producing cultural meanings and turning the parade into a text about the nation.