End Totalitarian Teaching (Part 3 of 7)

This article is the third in a seven-part series that implores teachers to abandon their attachment to outdated, oppressive, and arbitrary control issues, in the name of harboring a more positive, fostering learning environment.  Each part of the series focuses on a different aspect of control.  Part 3 focuses on the aspect of enforcing dress code.

Imperative #3:  Cool It With the Dress Code

I’m not completely committed to the idea yet, but I’m pretty sure that school uniforms are the best way to go.  It would liberate the students from the struggle of deciding what to wear (and the chronic tardiness that stems from this process); it would improve the image of the school in the community, and it would quite neatly eradicate all the ridiculous, ambiguous, and time-wasting disputes that arise on account of dress codes.

When I was a freshman in high school – young, naïve, hot-tempered, and unable to articulate my frustrations quite as well as I can now – I once attended class in a flimsy white tee-shirt whose print read, in giant black letters: “BITCH BITCH BITCH.”  It was unacceptable to wear clothing with profanity on it, though of course “bitch” is one of those favorite profane words of all smart-mouthed kids which serves also to innocuously describe a female dog – and of course this is always the context in which it is intended when brandished on the tee-shirt of a fourteen-year-old boy…   It was my geometry teacher, in the middle of class, who compelled me to turn the shirt inside-out so as to conceal the offensive material.  I argued the point as much as I felt was safe, but ultimately obeyed.  Much to her dismay, the tee-shirt was a hand-me-down, once worn by my father for similar expression, and it was so old, thin, and moth-eaten that the print could be read through the other side, and so in giant grey letters, my shirt now read: HCTIB HCTIB HCTIB.”  The class laughed and the teacher surrendered, and aside from failing to enforce the dress code, she had succeeded in only two things.  First, she had drawn more public attention to the shirt than if she had simply ignored it.  Second, and more importantly, she had wasted five minutes of precious teaching time to combat an issue that would not have fazed most other students.

My geometry teacher, and seemingly most teachers and administrators in the field these days, do not understand that regulating apparel does not equal learning.

There are some articles and styles of clothing which obviously cannot be permitted in a public educational setting, lest they add to the already copious list of distractions students have.  Such prohibitions would include profanity, drug and alcohol advertisements, sexual content, glorification of weapons and violence, gang affiliation, and indecent exposure.  The list is not exhaustive, but certainly these and all other reasonable apparel concerns would very easily be eradicated by appropriate school uniforms.

These are not the issues which must be contested.  Rather, it seems that totalitarian teachers and administrators want students to arrive in de facto uniforms without actually requiring true uniforms, and to that end, they draw up extensive, ambiguous, and ever-expanding lists of prohibitions against the most harmless articles of clothing.  Students are reprimanded for wearing plain-color baseball caps and knitted hats simply because they do not bear the school logo.  One wonders if the impetus behind this is not so much conformity but rather profit for the ASB department.  Students are reprimanded for slippers, sandals, flip-flops, and similar footwear, on the claim that they present some sort of safety hazard.  This is strange, as college students are notorious for wearing such casual footwear, and the national death rate among college students as a result of accidental flip-flop trauma is considerably low.  Meanwhile, P.E. departments seem to have no qualms whatsoever forcing their students to run the mile wearing shoes that provide no arch support or cushion; an activity that will almost certainly lead to shin-splints, knee injuries, and back injuries.  Students are reprimanded for wearing any design or logo that is said to be “gang-affiliated.”  It is true that street gangs use designer brand names as code for their own insignias.  However, as authorities come to learn these code-systems and prohibit the logos, the gangs change the code systems so that new logos will serve as their crests, in place of the outlawed ones.  Thus, the authorities have failed to eradicate the criminal advertisement, and they are forced to repeatedly learn new code systems in order to ferret out those students who are affiliated with gangs.  Wouldn’t it be better to simply let the gang-members openly announce themselves with their own, chosen insignias?  It seems they want to, and giving them the satisfaction would make criminal profiling so much easier.  Finally, there is a whole slew of issues that arise when certain articles are allowed “in moderation,” such as the number, location, and gauge of body piercings, the length of permissible skirts and shorts, the width of blouse straps, the length of sleeves, and the propensity for accessories to double as weapons.

These, and many other petty quarrels are at the heart of dress code enforcement, and they are compiled on top of the regulation of those aforementioned issues that actually have merit.  All issues could be simply dealt with by requiring uniforms.  However, short of that, the petty issues need not be dealt with at all.  Every conflict that arises from dress code enforcement is time that is taken away from learning and studying.  This time is precious enough, and already regularly encroached upon by serious issues that warrant attention.  Furthermore, as with confiscating toys and all instances of totalitarian teaching, dress code enforcement contributes to an adversarial environment, and though it has already been stated in part 2, let the importance of this idea be reiterated here: An adversarial environment is not a learning environment.  Instead, it is a place where the students and the teacher are engaged in a constant struggle to outwit each other at some imagined contest, where the most important goal is to prove one’s cunning and superiority.  In this contest, learning cannot take place, first because the belligerents become consumed by the contest itself and cannot focus on the learning process, and second because the pupils have lost all respect for the master as a source of knowledge, leadership, and trust.

We cannot afford to spend our time nit-picking inoffensive, non-distractive, non-violent, and generally petty questions of apparel.  There is too much other work that needs to be done to correct our educational system and to actually provide useful assistance to our students.  Cool it with the dress code.  Let’s fix the education code instead.

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