Stop fighting our children!

THE EDITOR, Madam:

As a society, we should be very bothered when we see upper-school students, young men, being denied entry into their school over their hairstyles. It just does not sit well with me that these trivial matters supersede what needs our urgent attention: educating our young people. And before you think I am advocating for a wanton free-for-all approach to education, please know, this is not my point. What is needed here is a recognition of what is happening to our children. After almost two years of being out of school, in a pandemic, having to receive instruction primarily online, our youth deserve more sympathy, empathy and care than we display when we close our school gates on them over matters that are of little consequence in the grand scheme of things. Our priorities do not seem to be in the right place. These last few months have been a clear sign that our education system is not only broken, but backward.

Schools must have rules, but do some of us who enforce these rules so unwaveringly even realise that rules which have become outdated and irrelevant do more harm than good to the very individuals we are trying to empower through education? Rules concerning hairstyles for boys in many schools make it unacceptable for the young men to trim their hair in a ‘fade’ or ‘jersey’ style. The prescribed haircut is a low crew cut in which the hair is trimmed on one low level. Some student handbooks go as far as stipulating the maximum height at which one’s hair can be worn.

Hairstyles for men have long evolved beyond the crew cut. Even at the highest level of many corporate organisations, acceptable male hairstyles now include various fades, locks and even afros. At this time, with learning loss fast becoming a buzzword in educational circles, our concern for our children should be primarily to attend to their psychosocial and educational needs.

We need to stop fighting the children or forcing them to earn the right to be educated. We need to stop fighting them to conform to outdated norms to earn education and punishing those who do not conform. We need to stop holding them back for something that has little to no bearing on who they will really become in a few short years, namely, our nation’s leaders. We need to stop tokenising education as something gifted only to the privileged or those who conform and obey. We need to stop fighting the children whose right it is to be educated, to be loved and nurtured instead of rejected and oppressed for simply reflecting the society around them while trying to find themselves.

SHANIQUE LEE-LOUNDS

Chief editor/writing consultant