Michael Murgo - "Tuck in that shirt!"

While I’ve never been a proponent of dress codes, I never really examined how deeply disruptive they could be. As Edward W. Morris says, dress codes reinforce “race, class, and gender stereotypes and had the potential to alienate many students from schooling.” For example, many educators find that the cultural styles of poor and minority students irritate them and will thus cause the educators to discriminate and marginalize these students. Some students only wear what they wear to fit in with other students and not stand out, but doing this only increases the school’s perception of their resistance to it. These students often times dress the way they do to challenge “symbolic order” of bourgeois institutions, meaning they are going against cultural and societal norms of those with enough privilege to establish the norms. To challenge the challengers, schools often try to force their students to abide by proper comportment. They achieve this by monitoring students’ bodily discipline – regulation of bodily movement and displays. This is usually done through dress codes.

There is another form of regulation, though, and it is a hidden curriculum that teaches students unspoken lessons about their race, class and gender. This is where the unfairness comes in on the side of the school. We learned about schools gendering children two weeks ago with the “Gendered Bodies” piece, but in this piece, it was found that, because of the color of their skin, black boys were found to be more challenging and oppositional than other students, which results in constant surveillance and policing of their clothing. Divides are being drawn between the races. Furthermore, in the case of Matthews’ rejection of baggy clothing, class lines are also being drawn. Sometimes it can be difficult for students to afford buying khakis and polo shirts. Schools argue that dress codes prepare students for future success, in that they force students to comply with and transmit cultural capital that is associated with upward mobility. The motives of the schools may be interpreted as just, but dress codes often wrongly masculinize and feminize students and are policed by educators wrongly. They force women to be more ladylike, they police black and Latino boys more fiercely, they think Asian and white boys do not need as much guidance as others. These only create alienation and resistance from students.

In my school, which was predominately white, dress codes never seemed like a major issue. We weren’t forced to wear any clothing in particular, but we there were certain guidelines to abide by: no midriffs, no visible underwear, tank stop straps must be the width of 2 fingers, skirts no shorter than what the tips of your fingers could reach when held by one’s sides, and no bandanas. Looking back, it really seems like the dress code is primarily policing women. I didn’t notice this until now. This further genders our society in unfair ways, as boys could get away with wearing almost anything whereas girls were the ones who were primarily sent to the office for “indecent” clothing. Coming from a high school class of 375 where only 3 students were black, I didn’t notice any racial divides. Furthermore, my school was in a relatively upper middle class neighborhood, but the schools’ dress codes did a good job of not being classist.

Overall, I’m not a proponent of strict dress codes, as, in addition to the gender, race, and class issues, I feel that they inhibit the creative expression and freedom of students. While reading this article, I was actually slightly disgusted at the thought of an institution telling students what to wear. It seems like such a basic freedom for people to present themselves the way they want to, that the thought of schools forcing an ideal of uniformity on them is seemingly anti-American. Individualism should be promoted in schools, not diminished.