I read this week about a mother’s disgust as her son had been sent home from school due to his new haircut. Apparently it wasn’t fair on the boy as he thought it was stylish and fashionable. Needless to say there was a photograph attached to the report and it’s fair to say it was neither stylish nor fashionable and was more reminiscent of three day old road kill lying strewn across the highway of his scalp.
Anyway I digress, surely the issue here isn’t the quality or lack thereof of this haircut but more the inability of this lad to adhere to the standards set by the school, standards which I have no doubt will have been made abundantly clear to him. Furthermore the issue is also his mother’s support of his deviation from what was expected of him and not of the school trying to enforce a minimum standard.
Maybe I’m just having a Jack Dee moment but isn’t this indicative of society today. We no longer seem to support standards, and I don’t mean sticking to impossibly high standards set by some old draconian miser but instead just simple, basic standards. Conformity seems to have become an ugly word, rules appear to be something to be broken and many appear happy to be sub-standard.
When I was in high school it was shoes not trainers, it was black trousers, not combats, ‘trackies’ or jeans and it was an ironed white shirt. Hair was short back and sides for the lads and tied up and off the collar for the girls. I probably disliked it at the time, I probably wanted to wear my trainers and jeans and a Stoke shirt but I didn’t because I knew that when I joined that school I entered into an unwritten contract to follow their rules and standards. In addition I did not breach these because my Dad would not have let me, he would have supported the school in enforcing these rules should I ever stray and if they had sent me home he would have let me know what he thought of my misdemeanour in no uncertain terms and would have immediately made me put right what I had done wrong.
So to the woman with the son with the dodgy hair do; support the school not your son’s desire for daft hair. They are not just trying to enforce pointless rules to annoy you and make you look after your own son for the day. They are giving him standards, they are making him see he cannot just do what he wants, he has to adhere to rules, laws, policies, procedures, guidelines etc. Not just now in school but in life. National service anyone??
