US School Dress Codes

The admirable NPR discussion show 1A recently had a discussion title, "When School Dress Codes Ban Students’ Bodies." The discussion elicited a lot of comments. Here is mine (lightly edited).

For many years back in the last third or so of the 20th c., the first assignment in my writing courses was "Clothes" ("Write about what you know about; write about what you care about"— and, oh boy, my students knew about clothes). What many of my students most wanted to write and talk about was high school dress codes. Here are some discussion questions we started out with.
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Discussion/Opening Questions:
(1) John T. Molloy [in Dress for Success] says that "Dress codes can work." If you've been places with dress codes—have they worked? If so,
How have they worked? For whom? To what ends? If authority figures have given you different justifications for dress codes than Molloy gives, which justification(s), if any, do you believe? How could you test the theories?
(2) With "code" in the sense of "a set of rules for affecting behavior and/or allowing communication," there were dress codes at your high school, and there are codes at Miami U. at Oxford (MUO). At your high school, who set the rules? How were they enforced? At Miami, what rules have you inferred?
(3) Molloy finds college students prejudiced about clothes; is this true? Are you(se) more prejudiced than high school students or, from Molloy's comments anyway, business executives?

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High school girls' having to kneel so adults in authority could judge the length of their dresses is mentioned in Jerry Farber's satiric essay from 1967 that you can look up under his name and "The Student as ...": "In some high schools, if your skirt looks too short you have to kneel before the principal in a brief allegory of fellatio." Farber's analysis was that dress codes are part of the larger function of American schooling in general to teach Obedience to Authority. What Farber missed in 1967 was that there are always social rules and that the key question are Who makes them, and How are they enforced? At the Oxford, OH, campus of Miami University, groups of students made the rules for their groups and enforced them through usually subtle, sometimes not, peer pressure. The strictness of student rules was clear in the shifts over time from backpack carrying over both shoulders to over one shoulder and than back to both shoulders. I counted 99/100 students obeying the rules, and a student tested the theory by wearing his backpack over both shoulders when the rule was one shoulder. He got looks but elicited a comment only when he buckled the waist straps: *that* was going too far. The one-shoulder rule was robust enough that a male student risked life and limb obeying it while riding a high racing bike in a strong wind next to a busy highway.

Little-League Syndrome and Learned Incompetence

REFERENCE: Ruben Navarrette, "America must end its complacency," Ventura County Star. 2 May 2017: 9A

                      

             In an effectively-argued attack on complacency among US Boomers, GenX, and Millennials, Ruben Navarrette is both too restrained and too expansive in arguing "America must end its complacency" (Star May 2, 2017).

            Concerning child-raising, Navarrette is too young to appreciate how much many American parents the last couple generations indoctrinated their kids in learned incompetence. I've called it "Little-League Syndrome," but the problem includes school sports teams and the other ways that adults organize the play of young children and what should be apprentice-adults. Kids today play better ball than we did, and the "syndrome" has been generally good for father-daughter relationships; but many American children have been taught that they're incompetent to organize even a pick-up softball game, and adolescents are taught they're incompetent to run their own park sports leagues.

            Until 1960, anyway, high school students in Chicago could join (illegal) high school fraternities and sororities, and social/athletic clubs and did organize park sports leagues — and run some of our dances and at least one charity.

            No more; now there's constant adult supervision, and control.

            On the other hand. there is "the migration habit" with individuals and peoples learning that one way to deal with bad situations is to move on. Outside of real horror shows involving a lot of death, though, only some of the people move on; others have stayed, and they, too, have a point. Similarly for people's staying on jobs long enough to learn the jobs well and for workers to form communities.

            "Change is good," on occasion, but so are continuity, stability, and not having to "re-tool" constantly.

            So: Let the kids out to play and start treating adolescents like young adults. But also allow people reasonable security, including job security, and the chance to settle down.

Well-Meaning School Officials (and Others into Control)

"He got a clipboard and a whistle and went crazy."

— Joke about guys newly in authority, ca. 1960

            In usefully discussing proposals to "hard block" various social media in county schools, my local newspaper, The Ventura County Star, referred to "well-meaning officials" who want to censor — often with good cause — what students, as students, can access.

            As one who attended an American grammar school and high school, and who taught for forty years in public universities, let me throw in a bit of background.

            The one time I taught at a maximum-security prison, I had a weird feeling like déjà vu. The Southern Ohio Correction Facility at Lucasville reminded me of something; and then it clicked: Lucasville Maximum reminded me of high school. Especially when people talk about "lockdowns," consider the possibility that modern American prisons can appear like high schools, and modern American high schools can be rather like prisons.

            More immediately, add that "well-meaning" officials can also be control freaks and that a fair number of high school administrators come from coachly backgrounds that encourage authoritarian control.

            There is much to be said for controlling kids for their own good; but whenever school officials say that that is what they're up to, kids and their parents should get very, very suspicious.

Teaching Kids to Fail: Another Weird One I'm Kind of For (30 Jan. 2014)

            Okay, I don't think we should teach kids to fail in the sense of encouraging them to fail but in the sense of helping kids learn how to deal with failure. And it's not like parents and teachers, coaches and other adults have to work out failure exercises: when appropriate, just step back and let the kids fail, or succeed, on their own and if they fail, as they say, "be there for them."
            (Usage note: To "be there for someone" means being there, available, not getting hyperactively pro-active on their asses and pushing upon them your aid and comfort.)
            There's a personal story here, as there is with a lot of writing, and this one I'll share. It's a fairly long story, and I'll be meandering to my point, but that's pretty typical of my writing, and I promise I'll get to failure and maybe say a couple other things of note along the way.
            Anyway, senior year in high school, my friend Dan and I found ourselves helping put together the annual new member initiation ceremony for our school's chapter of The National Honor Society (NHS). This was a long time ago, and if I ever knew how Dan and I got roped into the job, I've long since forgotten; but it was nothing onerous, and he and I were up on stage during a tech rehearsal, each holding a copy of the pamphlet from the National office on what was to be done, and our advisor standing around bothering no one as the school orchestra played their one required piece of music, a "March of the Priests" number, I think the one in Giuseppe Verdi's Aida.
            Into this silent, on-stage tableau trundled Mrs. Wilkinson, the Senior Class Advisor and a teacher of long tenure at the school: in Dan's words recently — picture Chris Christie in drag. Mrs. Wilkinson was heading toward the National Honor Society advisor, a new teacher at the school, which is why she had an assignment advising the local NHS chapter, which pretty much did nothing except induct new members and give smart students something nice for our "permanent records."
            Why, Mrs. Wilkinson demanded, was the orchestra playing what I'll call "March of the Priests" and not "Pomp and Circumstances"? She was not talking to me. She was … not tossing the question but pretty much hurling it like a Roman javelin at the NHS advisor, the new teacher.
            I took the question as an actual question and stepped between Mrs. Wilkinson and our advisor, script in hand, and said, "It's 'March of the Priests' because that's what the National initiation calls for, not 'Pomp and Circumstances.'"
            After forty years in the Ed Biz and other bureaucracies and general contexts of human interaction, I can look back and say confidently that what was going on had little to do with music — part of the reason I don't care much if I err in getting the music titles wrong — and much to do with status and a dominance hierarchy. Between two women, such acts are sometimes analyzed as "Queen-Bee Syndrome," but the more exact analogy (with maybe some homology thrown in) is with a large wolf pack. Mrs. Wilkinson certainly saw herself as an analog to the alpha-bitch, and I will use "alpha-bitch" as a term from animal behavior; women readers who have had experiences similar to that of the young teacher may apply "bitch" here with more loaded meanings.
            Anyway, I wasn't being gallant, just naïve, but found myself between Mrs. Wilkinson in medium-high dudgeon and her initial target — with me as a replacement target of opportunity for my effrontery in asserting "it's in the script" as a warrant more powerful than the preferences and will of Mrs. Wilkinson.
            And Dan came to my defense at least as far as looking at his copy and saying something like, "Uh, yeah; it's in the script."
            We were both in trouble.
            This turned out to be a good thing in the long run since my parents didn't have enough experience in such matters to help me out, so I asked Dan's mother, who was highly knowledgeable about psychology. (We had a functioning neighborhood, and Dan and I were raised by it.) Eventually, Dan's mom gave me the crucial bit of information for dealing with such situations: "You have to remember that Mrs. Wilkinson is a very stupid woman," and she gave us the good advice of taking great care in dealing with stupid people in power, however ambiguous it was what power — beyond locker assignments — the Senior Class Advisor had over anybody or anything.
            For sure, Mrs. Wilkinson had enough power to call Dan and me into her office. The new teacher wasn't summoned, and I suspect Mrs. Wilkinson forgot about her while she had Dan and me to properly subordinate.
            I got to her office early, and while we waited for Dan, Mrs. Wilkinson tried to put me at ease by telling me a mildly anti-Semitic joke. She then lit into me with "Why don't you ever take part in school activities?!" I did not point out that National Honor Society was arguably a school activity, and if I hadn't participated in it, I wouldn't be there in her office. What I did point out was that I was fairly active in Key Club but acknowledged that she was correct that I put most of my efforts into groups outside the school.
            "I can never be elected principal," I said.
            Not that I wanted to be principal or the head of any organization, but "I want my views taken seriously; I want clout" — this was Chicago, after all — "and I can't have influence or any authority as a school pupil." So I participated in a year club and a high school fraternity and was an officer in the charity group the fraternity was a part of.
            Warming to my point, if that's the phrase — and getting to my point here — I asked rhetorically about the importance of the tune to which NHS initiates marched down the aisles to get their certificates. Indeed, "Would people be starving in the streets if we messed up the whole assembly?" And then I stated my other reason for not putting my major extracurricular efforts into school-sponsored activities: "You won't let us fail, not if you can help it. So we really can't succeed." Also — I'm not sure how much of this argument I made to Mrs. Wilkinson — also, one needs to learn how to fail, as I well knew since the charity organization in which I did have influence and authority had recently had a pretty big failure and that particular buck, or small steaming bucket of shit, had stopped with me.
            And then Dan arrived, and we performed the required obeisance to Mrs. W. and her authority, and that was the end of the episode.
            Some fifty-three years later, I'll stick with what I believed at seventeen or eighteen. If you really can't fail, you really can't succeed either. If kids don't get experience handling failure, they've missed an important part of an education. This does not mean leaving it up to your two-year-old whether or not to play in traffic. It does mean that somewhere along the line in high school, kids should be encouraged to assume authority and take responsibility; and, if people won't be starving in the streets or some other horrible result would ensue — allowed the freedom to fail.

"You're Only Cheating Yourself" — and Some Other BS (6 Feb. 2014)

"You're only cheating yourself" — 20^th-c. Teachers' Cliché

"Sent my kid to college for a degree, and she came back with a bunch of ideas." —

Purported to have been spoken by a parent of

a student at Miami University (Ohio), 1980s

 
            It shouldn't, but it still sometimes surprises me how often people who like to hear themselves talk don't really listen very carefully to what they say, or, perhaps, don't think they'll get questioned about what they've just actually said.
            Even smart people.
            There was a brief exchange on a fairly recent TV comedy — it might've been Modern Family — where the father or father-figure quotes to a kid, "That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger," which is from Friedrich Nietzsche, who should've known better. The kid answers wise-ass and wisely by noting that the grandfather of a friend of his survived a stroke, which made him, the grandfather, a whole lot weaker. If the script writers had wanted to push the point (and it is well for the scene that they didn't), they could've had the kid note that Nietzsche's tertiary syphilis or "manic–depressive illness" or brain cancer or stroke or whatever he had toward the end of his life didn't kill him for a long time and certainly did not make him stronger.
            Or there was the spokesperson for President Obama who noted that in 2014 the President would get some proposal or other through the Congress of the United States, necessarily including the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, "by any means necessary." Uh-huh. I forget what the proposal was, but it was part of the long, long list of measures that would never get past the Republicans, a proposal I suspect should be approved, and one possibly crucial for the well-being of the Republic.
            President Obama has amply shown his willingness to use as means to important ends such means as drones, small missiles, and a SEAL assassination team. Still, however tempting, he's not going to send a Predator drone to launch an AGM-114 Hellfire into a meeting of the House Republican Caucus.
            Obama will not use "any means necessary," and, as in many cases when the phrase is thrown around, that is a good thing.
            So sometimes people just aren't listening to what they say. Other times, they may not be quite so bright as Nietzsche (not even the brain-damaged Nietzsche), and still other times people might reveal more than they intended.
            Which brings me to my headnote quotations and the theme in much of my writing of education and other school activities.
            "You're only cheating yourself" if you cheat in school if, but only if, your primary purpose in school is getting an education and if, but only if, you're cheating yourself out of some education if you cheat on some exam or test or exercise in school.
            And/or your cheating only cheats yourself if your cheating undermines moral training as a primary goal of education — and if you ignore that your cheating may cheat of your classmates as well as "the System.
            For most of the time I taught in the US higher ed system (1960s to 2006), yearly surveys were taken of incoming US frosh on what their goals were in going to college and there were periodic studies by diligent scholars of student attitudes, behavior, history, etc., etc., etc.: college students were and remain fuckin'-a fascinating to workers in a whole little academic and journalist industry. And in good sociological fashion, scholars and reporters have documented in detail the screamingly obvious fact that students go to college for all sorts of reasons, of which education is only one — and have made clear that goals beyond education and instead of education are just peachy keen, fine and dandy with all sorts of parents, legislators, taxpayers, and others interested in the system.
            For example, there was the line I quote above from the father of a college student (my source here is a sign on the door to the office of a colleague of mine, quoting the man). His daughter had gone to college and perhaps got a degree but, to his chagrin, had also picked up a bunch of ideas.
            Over the history of higher ed, relatively few students have been actively hostile to ideas and education — and not that many parents and politicians openly admit to such hostility — but still fewer students have had "the life of the mind" as their only goal. Since the time of the medieval universities, many students have gone to college primarily to rise in the world: which means nowadays a degree from a good school with a good transcript, and if cheating will help you get that, then the cheating is helping you get exactly what you want, not cheating you.
            Many students also desire, strongly, to have a good time, and if cheating frees time up for fun and games ("F&G" as we used to say), then it is to one's advantage to cheat.
            The issue can get complicated in other ways.
            Not so much in college, or most of my classes in high school, but I had a couple high school courses taught by certifiable whackos and some of the assignments were, let's put it, unproductive if not counterproductive. To cheat a bit on them — which we pretty much all did — didn't significantly cheat anyone. More complex was the couple instances when I (and others, I'm sure) cut some corners in an excellent class and "dry labbed"a preliminary exercise or two in Qualitative Analysis. I forget the details, but the basic dry lab strategy was to figure out what the results of the experiment would be and work back to report a plausible series of steps leading to those results — your results couldn't be too close to theory — and then write it up as a lab report.
            Since my lab technique was already competent, and since it turned out the only real lab work I went on to do was in microbiology and physiology, not any kind of chemistry, this cheating really didn't cheat me very much in terms of my education: I learned the theoretical material working up plausible results. And I really didn't cut enough corners to harm even saintly students who put in more time in the lab than I did and got the same or a lower grade. Well, I didn't harm them unless you believe that grades should very exactly reflect student effort. Trust me on that, however: grades should not be tied too closely to effort. People with talent and background in a subject find it easier and can produce better results with less work. (It may be annoying to pay a professional plumber a lot of money to come in and do in a couple minutes a job that might take you hours, but you got what you paid for: the pro has a whole lot more talent and experience than you've got and deserves good payment; not as much as plumbers usually demand, but that's a different issue.)
            There is, though, cheating which doesn't harm you at all but significantly harms others: cheating in an academic sense of "rat fucking," a term of art in politics for dirty tricks to mess over an opponent. Except in student life, "rat fucking" can be more direct, down and dirty — worse — than in politics.
            There were rumors of such things in law schools, where students at, oh, say, University of Wisconsin, Madison, couldn't leave out their notes in the library without getting them stolen and where books on reserve might have pages torn out. I didn't encounter such behavior until I found myself a mid-year-entrance Specialized Chemistry student at the University of Illinois (Urbana) in courses with pre-meds.
            One course was Zoology 101, where I couldn't figure out why during "practical exams" in labs we were numbered and went through identifying body parts of dead amphibians moving from station to station in line, in numerical order. Since I was helping the lab instructor get through Organic Chemistry, I just asked him why, and he said that before they started formally numbering us, unnumbered, unidentified students 1-12 (for example) in line would more or less correctly identify "right ventricle" and from 14 on it'd be pretty consistently "left knee"; some schmuck moved the pin. In Qualitative Analysis or Organic Chem lab, I recall stepping into the aisle and announcing to the group, "Hi, guys. I'm Rich. I'm in Specialized Chemistry; I'm not in pre-med competing with you for a place in med school — and the next guy who throws my 'unknown' down the drain is going to get a face full of hot acid." I doubt I'd have actually have done such a thing, but before Richard M. Nixon gave the policy a bad name by practicing it while armed with nukes, there was something to be said in many guy-cultures for a small person to be thought mildly psycho (I got knocked around once in high school in a random bit of street violence, but I was never bullied [then again, I also cultivated large friends]).
            Anyway, no one threw my "unknowns" down the drain after that, or contaminated them, and I came to my second conclusion of what I'd do if I ever taught (and teaching seemed increasingly in my future as an alternative to going to Vietnam or going to jail). The first conclusion was that I'd grade "blind," not looking at the names of students I was grading. The second conclusion was that screwing over other students was one form of cheating I would not tolerate.
            I ended up teaching English, so my practical rule was that plagiarism wasn't that big a deal with me: I told my students saw catching plagiarism as a game, and if my students wanted to try some theft here and there I would see if I could catch it and flunk the paper (later on, plagiarism had to be reported, and the cheater might flunk the class). If I caught them messing over another student, however, I'd do my best to get them thrown out of school.
            There I was indeed serious. With plagiarism my students were cheating themselves a bit, since I really could help them improve their writing; but plagiarism was mostly cheating themselves, if only a bit, and gaming the system; and they were playing against a guy — me — with more experience than they had plus an "ear" sufficiently non-tin to hear, e.g., a shift in voice from 1940s Ivy-League or U of Edinburgh professor to early 1909 Oxford U lecture to 1970s undergrad from greater Cleveland. (Although one student did confess to me about cheating I hadn't caught — as part of some sort of rehab program — and I'm sure I missed many others.) Cheating by bringing down other people's grades — stealing someone's notes, not returning reserve books to the library, messing over others in group work — that was despicable.
            Just sliding through school, though, cheating as necessary to get the "paper" — the diploma and transcript — without cutting into "F&G" and a four-day weekend: well, I couldn't get too upset.

            Still, students cutting a lot of corners are cheating the state a bit where states still subsidize education, and they may be cheating their parents a lot. Especially in courses where grades are "curved," they do harm more honest students. And they are also cheating, somewhat, if less that others, themselves. They've missed an opportunity to come back from school "with a bunch of ideas."