If we’re going to nitpick 
, it does say ‘transition’. And which part of the workforce, anyway? I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that the kid in question doesn’t have a burning desire to be a flight attendant, nor an accountant.
I’ve worn similarly casual t-shirts with messages (though frankly mine veer to the absurd, not the political or sexual) to work. I work in a white collar industry but my company has a casual dress code. Some people wear sweats which is too casual for my liking, but as long as I’m allowed to dress comfortably, I am happy with the dress code. I would say that for a dress code that was for transitioning to tertiary education and the work place that’s not bad. If the school wanted more formal dress then they need to enforce it not just for school photo days. If she’s been allowed to wear it previously without comment it seems like a storm in a teacup.
My grade 11 and 12 “college” in Australia was uniform free and no one dressed up for class photo days except the drama kids who were fabulous. I think I found a clean black sweater to go with my habitual stick-it-to-the-man fatigues and black beret for the day. (I grew up a lot since then. Heh.) No one said a peep.
Not if her story is true. She says she’d worn the shirt on other days without a problem, but was told to change it because someone was worried that parents would complain. That has nothing to do with the workforce, higher education or school policy.
To each his/her own. Personally, I don’t see anything evil or discriminatory or speech-infringing about requiring people to “dress up” on one single day of the year. Big friggin’ deal.
So I could counter her shirt with one that says something like “Homosexuality is a sin, the Bible says so”?? or “Jesus saves”??
Do we really need our children running around the school making political, religious, and social statements? They’ll have the rest of their lives to do that.
School is for learning and whomever is running the school can determine the best way to do that. The principal and the admins are held accountable to the school board and those are elected positions supported by the tax-payers.
If they have the power to make the kids wear uniforms then they can certainly moderate what sort of wording and what types of clothing the kids can wear.
As far as the OP, no kids do not have the right to wear whatever they want at school.
Do you have the right to wear whatever you want at work?
I wouldn’t have a problem with kids wearing either shirt at school. People don’t suddenly become religious, political or social beings once they graduate from high school, and there’s no one use pretending otherwise.
This one’s gonna end up in GD.
Would be people still be supporting her right to do so if the shirt had read “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve”?
Or maybe a pro-Nazi shirt?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
That may be the case, but you absolutely cannot allow the school to become a breeding ground for religious, political, and social battles. Would you want your student to come home with pro-Bush, or pro-Kerry propoganda handed down from one of the teachers? Why should we allow the same from other students?
Heaven forfend. They have opinions, and one of the functions of a school is to prepare them for the rest of their lives. I think that includes allowing them to exercise the rights that adults have. How else do you learn how to do something responsibly? The schools should have a little bit of leeway to deal with speech that’s legitimately hateful, but that’s probaby all they need.
Yeah, it’s bound to.
It’s this sort of stuff that makes me support the concept of school uniforms at all grade levels.
This should have said wearing, not making (as in saying).
I mostly agree with you. If the students were just talking among themselves or through certain discourse that comes up within the school ciriculum I would have no problem with it. However, wearing a statement on the clothing that is designed to illicit a response from those that don’t agree with you is just asking for trouble.
Again, would you be ok with the teachers politicising from the lecturn? Would if be ok if the math teacher spent the hour talking up the actions of the Bush admin in Iraq? These things fall outside the normal ciriculum. If there were activities that incorporated constructive and thoughtful discussion in any of these areas I would not except to that. It’s the blatancy and in-your-face attitude that I would be against. Such in-your-face things would be a teacher lecturing about the wonderfullness of the Bush admin, or a student wearing a possibly questionable slogan on her clothing.
High Schools present a unique challenge.
I don’t think high school students should have to check their free speech at the door. But I also think that high schools rightfully have the power to regulate to some degree personal behavior and decorum at school.
High school has the primary purpose of education, obviously. That’s why I support the concept of school dress codes, although I don’t support every use of them. School dress codes keep overtly offensive/controversial things out of school to avoid serious behavioral outbursts that could impede the education process. There are many schools where wearing a Ku Klux Klan t-shirt or a swastika t-shirt for example would cause extremely serious problems and fast.
And then there’s also the common sense aspects that kids do need to learn that in the real world you don’t always get to dress however you want whenever you want. It’s good life experience to be in a situation where you can’t walk around barely covering your genitals or ass, for example.
So the appropriate response is… trouble?
I don’t think that’s remotely comparable. Teachers should, generally, refrain from politics because they’re in a position of power and could make things uncomfortable for the students who disagree with them. (When we’re talking about a math class, needless to say, that’s also a waste of class time.) When two students wear shirts offering different political opinions, the gap in the power structure doesn’t exist. Neither one is stifling the other. It’s not a major problem because students, in my experience, aren’t that political anyway, and even if they were - so what? Maybe they’d learn not to make a big deal about somebody else’s t-shirt. That’s a lesson I wish more adults had learned as children.
Well, for one, wearing slogans on a t-shirt is by no means harboring constructive debate. I wear a “Bush rooles” t-shirt on Monday and then you wear a “Bush sux” t-shirt on Thursday - yawn. There’s no real debate or learning going on there.
True, but there isn’t any positive gain from it either.
Another point that I wish to bring up is that only the more ‘vocal’ students will resort to this type of activity. The average students and your more timid types will simply withdraw. Is that good?
You’re right about adults needing more tolerance.
There’s no constructive debate, but so what? It’s a shirt, not an essay. I say you let them wear it, all other things being equal.
I think it’s indifferent. I don’t understand how anybody ‘withdraws’ from something that’s not a debate in the first place. We’re talking about a situation in which people who choose to wear political shirts do so, and that’s it. It’s not intimidating to anybody, and it’s of no interest to the average student. So why shouldn’t the people who are actually interested be left alone?
The students that would be intimidated are the ones that may disagree with the message but would never otherwise vocalise their opposition, unless under more controlled conditions, such as a teacher organised debate.
Then we have the ‘who gets to decide when to say no’ debate about which messages are ‘OK’ and which ones aren’t. Who’s going to want to make those day to day choices and risk pissing off some students and parents.
Lisa comes to school with an Osama Rules!! shirt on, Billy comes to school with a ** KKK ** shirt on, and then Fred comes to school with a The Black Panthers Suck shirt on. Do they all get to wear them? Or should they all stay in their dressers at home?
I’m still not seeing the intimidation here. A student who chooses not to wear a political shirt (and that’s what 99% of them choose on any given day) is not intimidated. A student who wanted to wear one but didn’t do so out of fear is is intimidated, but I don’t think that’s affected by anything as trivial as the shirts of other students.
Always a problem, but as I said in one of my earlier posts, I think the school should have some control over these things. When they’re seriously offensive or advocate harming someone, don’t let the students wear them. When you start going past that, you soon get needlessly restrictive.
In my HS, there were people who wore clothes that slightly resembled the uniform (ie, a white polo instead of a blouse). However, when it came to photos, these were not allowed. They didn’t bother enforcing it for the rest of the year because it took too much time.
Is it such a surprise to everyone that a school wants to protect an image, and that some parents don’t like lesbians?
Part of the reason why I feel so strongly about this is a truly believe that teens will rise to the occasion. Some high schools feel like prisons. I knew of one where kids weren’t allowed to have anything written or attached to their backpack. My high school banned hats, even though it was an outdoor based campus and winter mornings got bitterly cold. How am I not supposed to feel demeaned when I can’t even keep my ears warm at 6:30 AM because someone who works in a nice heated office thinks my polka-dot beanie with a puff ball on top might cause a gang war?
In my experience, if you treat people like children, criminals or animals, they will act like it. If you treat them like people with growing responsibilities, they will learn to be responsible. And I can’t think of anything more infantalizing than telling people they are not even trusted enough to pick out their clothes in the morning. I’m not sure how we expect our high school students to act like adults when we treat them like pre-schoolers. Instead, let’s set our expectations high and watch them rise up to meet them.
Yeah, and as long as you don’t cause a riot, it’s cool. My high school had kids wearing shirts of all types- from “Pray Hard” to Marilyn Manson half naked on an upside down cross- and we all managed to grow up. Kids are not squirrels. They can handle seeing something shiny or provocative without losing their senses. Indeed, being able to handle being around things you don’t agree with is probably an important life skill that you should learn before heading out in to the world.
In any case, I agree that there has to be some rules in place to make sure the kids don’t come to school in bikinis. And I think a common sense “is this advocating something illegal or has this caused an actual problem” approach is best. It’s what we use on the dope, a place with an intellectual learning-based atmosphere, right? Isn’t that what we want in schools?
Well, yeah. I would be right proud if my kid spent high school making political, religious and social statements. It’d show they are spending their time thinking and forming opinions, not just blabbering about Britney Speares. Youth is a time of great passion and a time where we are forming our identity, and I don’t see why we should limit that when it isn’t causing a problem. Youth is also a time of learning self-moderation and what is appropriate and what is not. I think thats best learned by letting kids make their own choices, even if that means they fail now and then. It’s better to wear an inappropriate shirt to high school and realize it when you get a lot of raised eyebrows and stares than to try it out for the first time at a job interview.
I’m a little biased here. When I was a youngster I used to have a punk rock fake leather jacket. In it I carried a roll of masking tape and a permanent marker. When I read a news article or something that I had a comment about, I’d tape it to my jacket and write my opinion of it on the tape. Kind of a mobile proto-blog. It’s something I look back fondly on and prompted me to read the paper daily and to keep up with issues that interested me. I still haven’t lost my passion for learning, public discussion and debate. But maybe I would have lost the habit somewhere along the way if my school tried to stamp that out.
At some places I’ve worked I had, at others I haven’t. Right now I don’t have a dress code, but I’ve learned whats appropriate thanks to about 15 years of picking out my own clothes. I’ve worked some jobs where the more ridiculous my getup was the better. I spent half of college braless in pajamas with bright pink hair with no ill effects.