Its about time , a rant

[KristyHall]

I have felt that many dress code rules in our local schools have been some of the most pointless and arbitrary rules. I thought so as a student and I still feel such as a 29 year old woman.

Well I had the local news playing on my TV when I heard a spot on the local school district finally allowing boys to wear studded earrings, and that was after they had to be petitioned by a student expelled for the earrings.

While the rest of us have been living in the 21st century for 12 years, the local school board is finally creeping into the 20th century. Earrings on boys stopped being shocking by the early 90s.

As a teenager I was (luckily) never suspended for my open questioning of authority and of rules I found pointless. I helped other students understand their religious rights when over zealous administrators tried to prevent them from wearing religious symbols or long hair (native boys) while allowing other religious groups to wear their symbols of the same size.

Watching administrators pick and choose who they would enforce the rules with soured me on any sense of fairness. They calmed down in my school when a couple hundred students showed up wearing rainbow shirts in response to a boy being expelled for carrying a gay pride sign during a baseball game after the administrators made him remove his rainbow belt.

Styles and dress largely came about (at least in recent history ) to recognize differ net classes, religions, and creeds of people.

IMO, for one homogeneous group to force a strict (I emphasis strict since style changes with each generation and there is always an exception to any social rule) specific dress code upon a populace (men must wear x, women must wear z, and men can not wear z and women can not wear x) is little more than an unnecessary display of power in an attempt to force others to appeal to their own sense of taste.

Now I am not including dress that is dangerous, inflammatory (a shirt with racial slurs), and so on. I am speaking about the relatively harmless dress (Men with sparkly rainbow belts and women in suits)

What i find acceptable.
Males in dresses
Males with long hair
Males with earrings
Females in suits
Females with short hair
Religious apparel
Hats
Wigs
Males with make up
Females without make up
Ethnic apparel

I just don't see the reason for the controversy.

 

[Year of the Rooster]

Well said, and I agree. A friend of mine went to a school where it was mandatory for ALL GUYS to be clean shaven. No facial hair allowed at all. Talk about ridiculous...

 

[chickened]

The reason for dress codes is two fold, one is to prevent the slippery slope of someone deciding what is proper and what is vulgar which is almost impossible to really say for all it takes is one person to want to wear a neo-nazi shirt and when he is told no it would violate his right to freedom of expression while another person may wear say a shirt that expresses thier sexuality (like anybody cares) and then you have a another person or group that opposes that shirt... again the avoidance of a slippery slope.

Secondly, is the distraction that clothing causes in learning. After all school is for learning not a place to have your fashion statement critiqued.

http://www.ehow.com/about_5459238_pros-cons-dress-codes.html

Dress Codes in private schools is usually mandatory and parents have to actually pay their fair share and so it goes over pretty well.

In public schools not all have dress codes require uniforms, but then again public schools have lower academic scores and a higher dropout rate.

Dress Codes are always controversial (probably why it is a topic with the OP) and there is really no easy answer but I will say just look to the stats in schools with dress codes and those without and decide for yourself.

When you are 30 years old, no job, living in mom's basement what you thought was so important about what you wear should seem insignificant and shallow in light of the current living/social arrangement and one could argue a precursor to a government dependant situation when mom kicks the bucket. IMO.

 

[thaiturkey]

I have felt that many dress code rules in our local schools have been some of the most pointless and arbitrary rules. I thought so as a student and I still feel such as a 29 year old woman.

Well I had the local news playing on my TV when I heard a spot on the local school district finally allowing boys to wear studded earrings, and that was after they had to be petitioned by a student expelled for the earrings.

While the rest of us have been living in the 21st century for 12 years, the local school board is finally creeping into the 20th century. Earrings on boys stopped being shocking by the early 90s.

As a teenager I was (luckily) never suspended for my open questioning of authority and of rules I found pointless. I helped other students understand their religious rights when over zealous administrators tried to prevent them from wearing religious symbols or long hair (native boys) while allowing other religious groups to wear their symbols of the same size.

Watching administrators pick and choose who they would enforce the rules with soured me on any sense of fairness. They calmed down in my school when a couple hundred students showed up wearing rainbow shirts in response to a boy being expelled for carrying a gay pride sign during a baseball game after the administrators made him remove his rainbow belt.

Styles and dress largely came about (at least in recent history ) to recognize differ net classes, religions, and creeds of people.

IMO, for one homogeneous group to force a strict (I emphasis strict since style changes with each generation and there is always an exception to any social rule) specific dress code upon a populace (men must wear x, women must wear z, and men can not wear z and women can not wear x) is little more than an unnecessary display of power in an attempt to force others to appeal to their own sense of taste.

Now I am not including dress that is dangerous, inflammatory (a shirt with racial slurs), and so on. I am speaking about the relatively harmless dress (Men with sparkly rainbow belts and women in suits)

What i find acceptable.
Males in dresses
Males with long hair
Males with earrings
Females in suits
Females with short hair
Religious apparel
Hats
Wigs
Males with make up
Females without make up
Ethnic apparel

I just don't see the reason for the controversy.

KristyHall, your very articulate writing suggests that whatever regime you endured at school did your education no harm at all.

I'm generally in agreement with you but there must be limits on dress code. School uniforms cost money but fashion competition can cost more. Outrageous dress, body piercing, tattoos and hair fashion may be provocative or dangerous. Also, whilst I believe that education should be for the benefit of students' future lives in general, it must also prepare them for the expectations of future employers.

The problem is not whether a line between acceptable and unacceptable should be drawn but where it should be drawn. Fashion and taste change and young people want to experiment. If their parents don't perform their role effectively, then the schools must step in. Head Teachers have their own ideas that may be behind fashion but they also have to please the school authorities. Students will lead in fashion but how are the adults in authority over them supposed to know which new apparition will become generally acceptable? With the best will in the world, they will be behind the times and take a conservative view.

My Grammar School Headmaster belonged to an extreme religious sect and had very rigid ideas about dress code. That didn't stop him from looking down the girls' dresses though. The written rules said that boys must wear black shoes. He hated change and non-conformity so much that he had to add 'leather' when suede came into fashion, then round-toed (winkle pickers), then lace up (Chelsea boots). We laughed and complied, learning as we did how ridiculous was his attitude.

In one of my management jobs many years ago, a young employee complained to my HR manager that he was discriminated against because he was told to remove an earring. Earrings on men were not acceptable to our visiting corporate customers in those days. Without a word to me, the HR Manager called the Group HR Manager, a self-proclaimed feminist, for advice. She said that he could wear his earring. Then the young man's boss complained to me.

I called the Group HR Manager.

Me: Dot, what's this all about? Why are decisions being made without my involvement and for what reason do you change the standard office dress code?

Dot: We have to treat males and females equally. The young men in my local bank wear earrings.

Me: Dot, I don't care what goes on in your bank. I'm applying group rules here and you're changing them on a whim. The corporate visitors that keep us profitable down here would not be impressed by men wearing earrings in my office.

Dot: I'm not at all prejudiced, you know. For example, I believe that women should all wear stockings or tights at work.

A moment's pause while wonder what substance the woman is on.

Me: OK, Dot. Tomorrow, morning when the office opens, I will stand at the foot of the stairs and look up to see whether ............

The 'phone went dead before I could finish my sentence.

I called my boss. My instructions were taken from him, not HR or the cleaners. His response is not repeatable but the conclusion was that males were not allowed to wear earrings in my office!

Today, it would be very different, Probably no-one would even notice, including me.

 

[cassie]

I have been out of high school for many many years, but even in the Dark Ages when I was incarcerated (it seemed like incarceration to me) dress codes were arbitrary, pointless, unevenly and unfairly enforced, and lacked anything in the way of common sense. I remember the beginning of my sophmore year the girl's dean was sending female students home in droves because she felt the clothes they were wearing were too short. For the record, the hemlines were mid to just barely above the knee. The dean thought they should have been below the knee. The clothes in question had been purchased by the girls and their mothers not from Victoria's Secret, like the dean seemed to think, but at the back-to-school departments of Sears, Macy's, I Magnin, Joseph Magnin, Penney's and other establishments of ill repute. Only after she had some not-too-pleasant confrontations with a horde of outraged and irate mothers who informed her in no uncertain terms that they were NOT buying new school wardrobes for their daughters did she back down. I think one of the mothers actually made the dean come with her to the shopping mall to see for herself what was being offered for back-to-school wear. Now this all happened in Saratoga, CA an upscale community of generally well off and conservative folks. If the clothes could have been in any way considered immodest, in poor taste, or inappropriate, they would never have even been offered for sale in that area. The merchants valued their bottom line and they knew very well what would go over and what wouldn't.

 

[Lidea teapot]

I'm from the uk and the better the school the more uniform the uniform. I hated school uniform but could see the advantage. If you went to my school youd be recognised by your uniform. When in uniform you represent your school. Your schools reputation rests on YOU. The school works better as a team and the students do better coming from your school. You have pride telling people what school you attended. And I'm not talking private schools. It's just the schools that refused to let theyr uniform slip away genaration after genaration everyone who addends the school knows the uniform and were to get it. Oh I'm not that old I'm 35. My daughter now attends high school and isn't allowed to set foot in the school without her blazer on. Higher education is free in Scotland so if you want to get the uni place your looking for every little helps even if it means wearing a stooped uniform and behaving in a sertan way when wearing it. It prepairs you for the big world where you are responsible for your own future. Respect the uniform. Ha ha
Well im on my way to being were I want to be and I think the uniform and the attitude it installs helped me with lots of rules I didn't understand till later.
If something works no mater how silly it may seem and you may not understand how it works yet but do it how you've been told when you know better you will understand. There is a place for everything go mad till your harts content finde yourself . That place is Uni

 

[canesisters]

Well said Lidea.

To quote the master of silliness that prepares for greatness, "Wax On, Wax Off."

 

[Mattemma]

I like the uniform idea,but hate the short skirts girls are often expected to wear. Uniforms and no jewlery would be fine by me.

That said I hope my kids opt to do an online school or homeschool.Some schools can be an absolute horror thanks to peers and/or adults with a power trip. I graduated 6 months early just to end the high school experience as soon as I could. Ah well atleast they know they can leave the school whenever they want. Wish I had had other schooling options when I was young!

 

[EweSheep]

My daughter's private school has changed and evolved over the years and this year they made it known for the middle and high school kids that they MUST wear uniform of khaki pants and polo shirts, nothing else. Before it was gauchy looking of today's teenagers wearing holey jeans, ripped jeans, mis maatched shirts, sloppy wearing and diaper bag pants (the ones that would appeared to ready to drop from your hips to floor). If you were caught wearing them, you will be written up and they will give you a shirt or jeans or a belt to "hike" those pants up. I'm all for it! They were having problems focusing in class because they wanted to keep up with the latest fashion statements and "be in" with their friends.

As for PreK to fifth grade, nice well fitted jeans or dress slacks and polo shirts are the ones required. Dresses should be at above knee but not mid thigh.

Jewelry is at a minimum. Nothing offensive or racial. Earrings on boys are a no no. Multiple earrings, nose earrings, tongue piercings are a no no for ladies and men.

 

[OldGuy43]

This discussion about private schools providing a better education than public schools reminds me of an incident from many, many many, Many, MANY years ago when I was a young man. A fellow was telling me how HE had gotten a much better education than I since he had attended a parochial school, (at a cost of thousands of dollars per year) while I had went to public schools.

He dropped the subject after I pointed out to him that he was telling me this while we both were standing in the same ditch with a shovel in our hands.

Oh, by the way, he never got out of that ditch. I did. So much for education being better because of how you dress.

A quality education has absolutely nothing to do with who has the best facilities or the strictest rules. The most important thing is the quality of the educators.

That subject reminds me of the texts when I was in grade school. In those days the teacher got a special edition of the book that had all the answers printed in the back. We always wondered why? Didn't she know the answers?