An update to last month’s decision by a school board in Mesquite, Texas to impose an in-school suspension on a four-year-old boy for the heinous crime of having long hair. You can always count on bureaucrats, especially public school bureaucrats, to stick to a dumb policy no matter how much the evidence mounts that it’s a dumb policy. True to form, the educational bureaucrats in Texas have offered a “compromise” to the parents of young Taylor Pugh, the miscreant who insists on maintaining a long hair style. They can braid his hair–as long as the braids don’t come past his ears.
How a boy with braids is less of a “distraction” in the classroom (the official justification for the suspension) than a boy with long hair, I will leave it up to the Texas hair police to explain. If this is the best that so-called educators can do with their time, I know a way that the hard-pressed Texas state budget could save some money. Eliminate those positions and divert back to the state treasury whatever funds are used to pay for them.
Repeat after me: We are not the Taliban. We should not try to dictate hair styles.
If you saw this story, you might assume that you slipped back in time to 1959. The educational bureaucrats of Texas have suspended a boy–a preschooler, no less–for having excessively long hair. The tot actually looks quite dapper–at least in any civilized part of the country. Furthermore, he was growing his hair so that he could later have it cut and donated to a charity that provides wigs to cancer victims who have lost their hair from chemotherapy treatments. One would think that he would receive praise, not be bullied, for such a generous impulse.
Even if charity had not been his motive, such idiotic regimentation should have disappeared by the end of the 1960s. But apparently it hasn’t in certain authoritarian precincts in the South. I have a suggestions for the Texas hair police, who apparently believe that every young male ought to look like he’s planning to have a career in the Marines. You have enough of a challenge educating the next generation, and most of the public schools aren’t doing a very good job at that task. Stop trying to dictate such things as grooming preferences. This is supposed to be a free country, and you might at least try to maintain that illusion a little longer with respect to your students.