Before I start this column, let me just say that I really do understand the reasoning behind school uniforms. I understand how a homogenous look can sometimes help with the awkwardness that comes from having students of vastly differing socioeconomic statuses attending the same school. And I understand that having everyone dress the same way could, perhaps, also create a sense of community between those same wildly differing students. And I even understand how a school uniform can make it easy to spot who belongs and who doesn’t: in a sea of black and white, nothing stands out quite so much as plaid. I understand all of this; I understand uniforms completely. What I don’t understand is the rationale behind a dress code.
Again, there are parts of a dress code I understand. I understand the need—especially when puberty first starts to run rampant through a population—to cover up certain body parts. (I’m talking about the parts that are usually only exposed when visiting a doctor or certain European beaches. Or perhaps when playing doctor on certain European beaches). And I also understand the rationale behind not allowing any type of clothing that glorifies illegal, immoral, or otherwise repugnant behavior. (Please leave your Presidential debate t-shirts at home.) And I even understand the need to place limits on clothing that could be considered distracting or disruptive: no matter how really, really cool that live scorpion bola tie is, it’s probably best to save it for the family reunion. So yeah, I understand both the basic idea of a dress code and the rationale behind implementing one.
What I don’t understand are vague and arbitrarily enforced rules about what color pants and shirt you can and can’t wear that are disguised as a dress code. Those rules I don’t understand at all. (Again, I get the whole homogenous argument, which is why I understand uniforms. But as anyone who has ever argued with their husband about whether those socks are blue or black can tell you, punishing people for wearing the wrong color shirt is a nightmare waiting to happen.)
Take the incident that happened in my family a few years back: my daughter, Clementine, went to a school where she was dress coded for wearing a grey shirt with blue trim around the collar. Grey was an allowable color. Blue was not. The blue in question was no bigger than a shoelace. It was not neon. It did not have batteries. It did not, from certain angles, advertise a particular brand of bong or vodka. It was just blue. And yet she was sent to the office for a “dress code violation.”
Who knows? Perhaps there was a vicious gang sweeping through west coast cities that September leaving a swath of destruction and despair a mile wide in their wake. Perhaps the school had just received word of their activities. And perhaps the name of that gang was…the Grey Shirt With Blue Collar Trim Gang! (Winner of the Most Awkwardly Named New Gang of 2010).
Perhaps.
Or perhaps her school was just so focused on the minutia of following the rules that it forgot why the rules were there in the first place. Perhaps it was so concerned with not appearing slack that it forgot that it was also important not to look ridiculous.
Looking back, I’m still not sure how Clementine wearing a grey shirt with blue trim on the collar that day prevented her from learning the value of x and the history of the former Yugoslavia, unless it was the fact that she couldn’t learn any of that because she was sitting in the office. On the bright side, however, it wasn’t as if she didn’t learn anything; unfortunately, though, in middle school they rarely give tests on”Ways to Survive A Bureaucracy.”
For that, you have to wait for college.