Bringing flexibility to uniformity

Your grandparents might know it.

A song Scottish singer Andy Stewart would almost certainly have sung from many a theatre stage during his touring visits here.

"I’ve just come down from the Isle of Skye, I’m no’ very big and I’m awful shy.

‘‘And the lassies shout when I go by . . . Donald, where’s your troosers?"

Stewart was singing in praise of a proudly worn kilt.

He wasn’t advocating defiance of strict uniform codes on the grounds that they enforce stereotypical binary gender norms.

But times change and a trend towards gender-neutral school uniforms puts a fresh perspective on that shout-out to Donald.

Fiordland College is far from alone in considering uniform changes that don’t simply mean boys and girls will dressing moreor-less identically. They would also allow for either gender to wear the other’s uniform.

Plenty of sensible reasons present themselves for girls to be allowed to wear shorts and for summer or winter uniforms to be worn out of season . . . but we all know that the real head-turner here is that boys would be allowed to wear skirts. Not just those kilts as Donald would know them. Skirts.

Cue memories of the Exeter schoolboys who took to wearing skirts during a heatwave last year. A least 80 British state schools now allow boys to wear skirts.

In New Zealand, look no further than Freyberg High in Palmerston North, where boys and girls can already wear each other’s uniforms provided it’s in complete sets. They can’t mix and match. Presumably because there’s still a point in schools where tolerance is less valued than tidiness.

There’s much to be said for inclusiveness.

Let the kids dress on a spectrum, we say.

This is a matter about which our society is increasingly relaxed and rightly so.

But it’s a fair prediction that those of us in the valley of the unconcerned will be hearing voices from the mountaintops.

Starting with the unease of those who simply find it all a bit silly and unnecessary, then extending to those who foresee a new system that gratuitously invites a sense of gender doubt or experimentation among the young and the very young.

The trouble with this view is that it underestimates issues that have long been arising for some of our kids only to be damagingly dismissed by the careless rigidity of the system.

And still higher up the mountain you have the views of those who see this as essentially an assault on religious certainties.

They will not be gainsaid.