File this under the Oh.Em.Gee label: Reports have surfaced that a teacher in Milwaukee cut off a student’s hair. Yes, you read right. An elementary school instructor felt that the young girl was playing with her braids too much, so said teacher lobbed one of them off. Needless to say, the child’s mother was upset and the teacher has since be fined and reassigned to a different class. But this story comes to the heels of a pre-Kindergarten boy being banned from school because he was sporting long locks. (Apparently, the Texas school has a rule about male students and hair length.) The child in question has a cultural reason for his style, yet he’s got to do time in at-school suspension until the issue gets resolved.
Now, while I understand the need for dress codes in these days when people think it is appropriate to wear dungarees to the theater, I would hope that there would be cultural clauses. (An effective example: A turban-wearing Sikh is excused from wearing a company issue-hat by the New York City transit authority.) Also, having attended elementary school at a place where shaking students (who were wearing uniforms, I may add) was on occasion, ok, I just can’t get onboard with such punitive physical discipline. And honestly, the two stories make my hair crawl a little. What do you think? –Jenna Mahoney
Monday, December 21, 2009
Talk About Hair Raising
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5 comments:
Dress codes? Okay. Let's got back to women wearing painful corsets and chastity belts.
Both of those stories are ridiculous and make me want to consider homeschooling (when/if I ever have children).
I agree with you on the braids issue. I disagree with you on the boy with the too long hair. If it was dress code, then why didn't the parents take the initiative and talk to the school? Did they not read the literature that talked about hair length? Or did they assume they were excused? Why did they wait until it was a problem? Assuming the school was upfront about their policies, the parents shouldn't be surprised that they took issue with his hair. If a child has a peanut allergy, or whatever, the parents don't wait until the kid has an allergic reaction to approach the school. Neither should a parent with some other kind of concern.
Dress codes cannot usurp law. You cannot have one set of standards for women and another for men. Hair length is of no consequence.
It need practicing and time to prove if it is right or not.
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