Principals, get a life and stop bullying children
Pause for a moment, and think about the strange world that is high schooling in this country. It may have been a while since you were last at school, but a lot of the worst bits have stayed the same. So topsy-turvy is this world that the people tasked with the education and role-modelling of incoming generations instead busy themselves bullying children. There are principals up and done this country who have foregone their otherwise honourable positions to enforce racist, sexist and downright stupid rules.
I’m going to cut to the chase right now, and say these principals need to go. It is time for them to walk out the school gate for the final time.
If you care more about enforcing indefensible uniform policies than you do about teaching, you shouldn’t be a teacher. It’s that simple.
Hastings Boys’ principal Robert Sturch would seem to be one of those. He has company, with colleagues at Auckland Grammar School, Macleans College and at least five other schools being equally misguided.
Teachers know these rules aren’t required. Outside the classroom, teachers freely admit the obvious; a kid wearing a short skirt, or braided hair, an earring or two, isn’t harming anyone. It’s the rules that are harmful.
A former principal told me how relieved they were to teach at a school without a dress code. ‘‘It’s crazy. When you finally stop worrying about how long someone’s fingernails are, you can connect with them. You can teach them.’’
Isn’t that the point of school? Apparently not. About eight high schools have been exposed for having discriminatory dress codes that ban Afros and braids. There is no imaginable reason to have such a rule, other than to exclude and discriminate against African students.
It’s problematic, on so many levels.
When Stuff reporter Jos Franks called up these schools, to seek their justification, they should have known it was time to back down. Had these presumably smart principals tested themselves, they would have surely realised rules like this don’t stack up in the 21st century.
Instead, old Mr Sturch from Hastings said there’s nothing wrong with his Afro ban. He said that if students didn’t like the rule, they should go elsewhere. A prospective student had gone to another school, he said, because his dreadlocks ‘‘did not meet the standards of the school’’.
It beggars belief that professionals, at the height of their careers, concern themselves with how teenagers choose to look. At worst it’s creepy, at best it’s misguided.
Let’s take a look at those justifications. My old headmaster used to say, ‘‘There’s a perfectly good school down the road.’’ It’s a saying most of Wellington will be familiar with.
But he, like Sturch, was missing the point. Schools are a melting pot of our communities, when they work. They bring together kids from different backgrounds, religions and neighbourhoods and teach a bit about difference. Schools, at their best, teach respect and co-operation.
But these pretentious principals are reading from a different page. They’re teaching intolerance and bigotry. They’re enforcing harmful ideas about beauty and appearance, that you must look a certain way to be successful or earn dignity.
What is that way? White, conservative, boring.
Sturch said dreadlocks fell below a ‘‘standard’’ the school set. What’s so wrong with a few dreaded locks; what has he got to be afraid of? It would, no doubt, do Mr Sturch and his sheltered boys some good to meet a few people who aren’t short back and sides.
Comments such as ‘‘There’s a perfectly good school down the road’’ diminish the seriousness of these discriminatory policies. It makes it seem like these are rules preventing a kid from wearing their favourite T-shirt every day, or non-regulation shoes. It is more serious than that.
The school term is still fresh, and already we’ve seen how schools are using their dress codes to discriminate against ethnic minorities. NZME reported on Marli Atu’s brave action, to take his school to the Human Rights Commission. It told him no cover up his tatau, a Fijian and Samoan tattoo with huge significance.
Atu knows rules like this can’t go untested. He knows he should not have to cover up his heritage, his whakapapa, his identity, because some old white dude wrote it in the school rules.
If principals think a person’s dress, their identity or body, isn’t up to ‘‘school standards’’, then they aren’t fit to teach. They’ve failed basic reasoning, and basic standards for being a decent human.
Now I think about it, maybe these rules aren’t so bad after all. At least students going into a school receive a warning about the type of ignorance they’ll have to live with. The problem’s not that students are failing to meet a school’s expectation – it’s a school failing to meet theirs.
If you care more about enforcing uniform policies than you do about teaching, you shouldn’t bea teacher. It’s that simple.