Your child’s iPhone may not be the only cherished belonging banned by his or her school. His black hoodie and her yoga pants may also violate the new rules of the new school year.
Dress codes, against all odds, are making a comeback in some school districts — while being curtailed in others, where politicians, waving the flags of feminism, multiculturalism, and gender ideology, cannot tolerate any codification of norms.
Bessemer, Alabama, is a shrinking steel town outside of Birmingham with a mostly poor, mostly black population. The city, population 26,000, by some measures is the highest-crime city in America.
Bessemer City High School made news for announcing it would strictly enforce its dress code, which prohibits pajamas, tights, hats, hoodies, open-toed slides, and Crocs, among other items. Midriffs must be covered, and skirts or dresses cannot be too tight. Some of this is for questions of modesty and preventing distraction. The footwear rules are about making fire drills and tornado drills safer.
Ypslianti Community High School in Michigan also tried to ban yoga pants, supertight dresses, and exposed midriffs, but a social media firestorm forced the administrators to back down.
New York City’s politicians, meanwhile, are curtailing dress codes, which in their view amount to discrimination against women, gay or transgender students, or racial minorities. So the government constrained principals’ power to set dress codes and set their own dress code code effective this school year.
For starters, the City Council wanted to make sure all sorts of cross-dressing was allowed. Second, any rules about female modesty are now verboten. “Schools also may not prohibit ‘distracting’ clothing or certain types of clothing that is stereotypically associated with one gender,” the new rules state. “For example, dress codes may not only prohibit miniskirts or camisole tank tops, which are predominantly worn by students who identify as female.”
These culture clashes are inevitable when we have no common cultural assumptions. As New York’s new law puts it, “Requirements should not reflect or promote generational, cultural, social, or identity biases.”
“Cultural, social … biases” are also known as standards and norms. Start with the idea that boys are boys, girls are girls, and that the two sexes are different in important ways — that idea is no longer accepted by our ruling or media classes.
The notion of modesty is also not popular. Among other problematic premises, modesty as a virtue ascribes to “sex exceptionalism,” which is an oppressive idea now.
But dig a little deeper into these anti-dress code arguments and you see some contradictions. How can you both accommodate diversity and demand equality? “Dress codes must be implemented equally and in a non-discriminatory manner,” New York City Public Schools state. Yet the district’s headwear attire has special carveouts for religious garb — is that not “discrimination” against the secular?
But if the schools in Bessemer and Ypsilanti persist, the communities, including most parents, are likely to see the benefits of dress codes, however old fashioned they may seem. And if the dress codes get too wordy or confusing, maybe it’s time to reinstitute school uniforms.