Dress does are fine, and I think I've even written that school uniforms can help create a good learning environment. But messing with a kid's hair is getting too personal:
A small rural school district in Fort Bend County and a determined mother are tangled in a dispute over hair.
Michelle Betenbaugh says her 5-year-old son, Adriel Arocha, wears his hair long because of religious beliefs tied to his Native American heritage.
But the leaders of the Needville school district have strict rules about long hair on boys and don't see any reason to make an exception in his case.
The dispute illustrates a problem American schools have faced for decades: how to balance individual student rights against rules designed to maintain order and discipline in the classroom.
Perhaps I empathize with the kid because I'm recalling my Ball State days, when I had luxurious locks that reached my shoulders. Or maybe I'm nostalgic about even more recent times, when I actaully had, you know, hair.
Comments
I'm OK w/ the Native-American issue...same goes for the Hasidic community or even the Amish.
What I take exception to is courting the "free-for-all" mentality that changed dress codes in the 1970s with predictable results..
People WILL judge you by the way you speak, dress AND wear your hair (however much we might posess then OR now).
In "our" day, many young men went directly into jobs where LONG hair was a safety issue (nothing says OUCH like watching someone's hair caught in machinery that makes no bones about ripping it out by the roots).
While such cannot be said today, there is a cause for not looking like a slob and being (mis)labelled in like manner.
Then, there IS the MILITARY...lol!
;)
B.G.
(no buzzcuts, please)