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.

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.

Happy Birthday, Jesus (Sometime Before Spring of 4 B.C.) [28 Nov. 2012]

  In Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (2012), Pope Benedict XVI notes, as a lead in the UK Daily Telegraph puts it, "Jesus born years earlier than thought." What I find most interesting about this story has been that it was news.

            In 1950, in a totally non-controversial passage in the history textbook The Ancient World, Joseph Ward Swain of the solidly Big Ten, classically Midwestern, University of Illinois, wrote that "Jesus was not born in the year 1," or, I guess, Zero. "Two of our four Gospels tell us that he was born under Herod the Great, who died in the spring of 4 B.C."

            Working through other information in the Gospels, the scholarly consensus by the late 1940s was "that Jesus probably was born about five years before the turn of the century" — in the Christian counting of centuries — and that it's "fairly certain that he was crucified on April 7, 30 A.D." Swain adds, "There is, of course, no evidence regarding the exact day of his birth, and not until several centuries had passed did Christians agree to observe Christmas on December 25" (II.476-77).

            Of course. And then Swain moves on to the significant historical stuff about "His" — Jesus's — "Preaching and Crucifixion," the next subsection title, and then a long discussion of the rise of the Church.

            So Jesus was "born years earlier than thought" by whom?

            Americans are a people of strong faith, but as surveys pretty consistently indicate, "large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions — including their own";  and, I'll throw in, that "large numbers of Americans" includes a lot of reporters.

            The United States is not "a Christian nation" mostly because we're not a nation at all; it's "the American Republic," and the Republic is a stew or chop suey or mish-mosh (not a melting pot) of races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions. Which is a damn good thing.

            We are, though, strongly … let's call it inflected by Christian culture, and Americans, for understanding our country, need some knowledge of Christianity. Also of the other world religions, but that's for another time.

            Christians especially should know Christianity, and it shouldn't be some sort of traumatic shock if someone tells them that it's a fair guess that Jesus was born in the spring — "when shepherds were watching their sheep in the field by night" (Luke 2.8) of 4-5 BC, and that it's no coincidence that Christmas in the northern hemisphere is a Festival of Lights like Diwali, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa: it's the winter solstice, people, and the time of the old Roman Saturnalia, so December was and remains an excellent time for a winter holiday balancing spring holidays like Passover and Easter. (The Islamic New Year, Muharram, is a quieter holiday.)

            It's Constitutional for secular public schools to teach about religion, and in principle the US Supreme court and NGOs like The American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way are all for such teaching. Still, serious religious education is politically risky for a school district and undoubtedly expensive: doing the job decently requires well-educated teachers.


            Someone, though, needs to do a better job, and the various Christian churches and Christian households are obvious places for serious study of the faith. One good way to start a discussion would be hitting kids with the neat paradox that Jesus Christ was born "B.C." and checking out what the Gospel narratives actually say on the subject. For that exercise, Pope Benedict has definitely supplied a "teachable moment."