Apparently, those were simpler times. According to a recent article, school dress code has become a contentious issue as of late with a growing number of teenagers using clothing to express, experiment with, and confound conventional forms of gender identity and sexual orientation. Here is a mere sampling of dress-code-related incidents that took place during the past six months: In one Texas high school, where boys’ hair cannot be longer than “the bottom of a regular shirt collar,” a cross-dressing senior was sent home for wearing a long haired wig. At a high school in Georgia, a young man was sent home for wearing a wig, makeup and skinny jeans. A student in Mississippi had her senior portrait barred from the school yearbook because she posed in a tuxedo instead of the traditional black drape worn by the other girls. So the question is: What’s a school to do? Are officials justified in punishing students for expressing themselves in unconventional ways? Should they be more or less tolerant of dress code violations that cross traditional gender boundaries? My first instinct is to say: “Uniforms all around!” Schools should select certain unisex items of clothing (i.e. tops, pants, sweaters, even ties) to be considered acceptable parts of the uniform, and as long as students wear some combination of those acceptable items, they should be left alone. That way clothing ceases to become an issue, and students are free to concentrate on what they’ve presumably been sent to school to do: learn. (As an added bonus, teens will also experience a first-hand lesson in appropriate workplace attire that will come in handy when they graduate.) But while uniforms may be an easy answer for some schools, most will not opt to go that route. Nor should they. The matter of school dress code, while it may seem frivolous, actually touches upon complex issues that lie at the heart of students’ high school experience—like identity, self-expression, and psychosocial development. Students need to learn to interact with people who look completely different than they do without resorting to harassment and discrimination. Some kids feel more comfortable dressing in ways typically associated with members of the opposite sex and many struggle to deal with complex questions about their gender and sexual identity. These students should not be punished, but given extra support. While building students’ academic knowledge and skill base is certainly a primary goal in high school, it isn’t the only one. Just as stories of students penalized for crossing traditional gender boundaries abound, there is an increasing number of anecdotes with opposite outcomes. For example, a freshman girl in Arizona who identifies as a male was nominated for homecoming prince this year, and an openly gay male student in California was crowned prom queen. At Rincon High School in Arizona, whose population includes students from more than three dozen countries, some boys wear makeup and frilly pink scarves while a subset of girls dress in typical male gear. Brenda Kazen, a counselor at the school, says: Gender expression is very fluid here…Our kids are just used to seeing different things, and they’re O.K. with it. And that, in my opinion, is an accomplishment. Certain exceptional cases aside (i.e. neither girls nor boys should be permitted to wear clothing that is inappropriately provocative) high school should be a safe place for students to discover and develop their unique identity and potential while learning to accept difference in others. (Photo courtesy of JasonRogersFotographie’s photostream/Creative Commons)
When I was a teenager in high school, we didn’t wear uniforms. At least not officially. Whatever clothing items were most in style at the time is what most kids wore, with one fad sweeping like a wave over the student population only to be replaced by another several weeks later. Of course, the coolest kids were always at the head of the trend while the un-cool kids (like me) either bucked the trend on principle (who would want to wear stone washed jeans anyway?) or caught on a little too late. Violations of the school dress code (i.e. no ripped jeans or t-shirts with inappropriate slogans) were kept to a minimum, and to tell you the truth, I was so uninterested in fashion that I probably would have been happier wearing a school uniform instead.
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