Papakura beards attack!

Everywhere you look these days there are things to get angry about, causes to rally round and stupidity to challenge. This blog has done all that. Today there’s a perfect example.

Facial hair.

Okay, it’s not facial hair as such, but the boneheaded thinking of Papakura High School. The South Auckland school has threatened to discipline a 16-year-old student for—gasp!—wearing facial hair.

In New Zealand, a 16-year-old is legally old enough to drive, get a tattoo and have sex, but, according to Papakura High School, cannot make decisions about their whiskers. By itself, that would just mean the school was being misguided by insisting on treating young people as mere children rather than preparing them for life in the real world, which, at 16, many of them are about to embark on.

But Papakura High School was more than just silly: It was insulting. According to the New Zealand Herald, the school’s principal, Angela Appleby, said it’s “a school rule that students be clean shaven, as the seniors were considered role models for younger children, and were required to set a good example.” (emphasis added).

Appleby is saying, then, that every person with a beard is setting a bad example. That includes famous people of the past, such as Edmund Hillary (before he was “Sir”) on his way down from conquering Mt. Everest. It includes virtually every 19th Century New Zealand Prime Minister—heck, it even includes the husband of the current Prime Minister. And, it includes me.

Understandably, I get a little tetchy when someone suggests I’m a bad role model simply because of something irrelevant, like that I have a beard. Next thing you know, someone will say it’s because I’m gay.

But back to Ms Appleby. Too many high school students, especially Maori and Polynesian students, leave school far too early and part of the reason is that it has no relevance to them. When people like Ms Appleby insist on imposing a worldview that died in the 1960s, treating soon-to-be ex-students like little children, can she really be surprised if some of them hasten their departure? And can we be surprised when they leave school and find themselves ill-prepared for life in the real world?

The irony is that if Ms Appleby had said that it was school policy that all students must be clean shaven, with none of that nonsense about role models and good examples, I would’ve thought that Ms Appleby and Papakura High School were simply stupid and misguided. But by promoting an antique view of the world, she’s crossed the line.

Obviously, Papakura High School needs to change its policies. It needs to start treating older students—many of whom will not complete their secondary education—as adults. They need to begin preparing students for life in the real world. And Ms Appleby either needs to move into the current century or move aside. It sounds, though, as if she’d have trouble functioning in the real world.