Impudent thoughts on teaching, power, and student attire
A teacher’s utterly outlandish punishment of a student for her attire is a sign of just how dysfunctional we’ve become.
Sometimes it’s the smallest things that highlight the biggest problems.
In February 2021, the CBC reported the unfortunate case of 17 year old Karis Wilson. Ms. Wilson had the unmitigated gall to wear a knee-length black dress with a bit of lace over a white turtleneck. For this outrageous lapse of decorum, the student was removed from class, and brought before the school’s principal.
Apparently, the dress code for that district’s schools is such that it excludes “clothes that promote the use of drugs or alcohol, that depict vulgar or sexual language or images, that discriminate against protected groups, that promote violence or violent groups or clothing that is ‘worn in a way that detracts from the teaching/learning process.’”
Ms. Wilson’s father told the CBC:
“[Karis] was told that it could possibly make the male student teacher feel awkward and it could make [her female classroom teacher] feel awkward since it reminded her of a lingerie outfit.”
He also said:
“There was a female who was singled out because what she’s wearing could make someone in a position of power over her feel uncomfortable. And the more you think of it, the more you say it, the more you understand that this is absurd.”
He’s right. It is absurd. And it’s a sign of our times.
The CBC link above includes a photo of the offending outfit. See for yourself: only the most regressively puritanical would find it risqué.
Mr. Wilson kept pressure up on the school and school board. Her classmates walked out of class in support. The BC Teachers’ Federation argued against the dress code. And even though the board claimed they’d already been working on a revised dress code, it took months for them to change it, “removing language that allowed staff to single out students for clothing they considered distracting to the learning environment.” They cited “changing societal norms and values” as the rationale for the update.
They should have cited their own cowardice and narrow-mindedness. They should have just said “We fucked up. We’ll fix it.” (Albeit, perhaps, in less colourful language.)
While you might think that all’s well that ends well, an apology has still not come, and the damage to Ms. Karis’s wellbeing, the stress on her family, not to mention the resources wasted in sorting this mess out, will stain the community for years.
Most importantly, however, is that this whole mess wouldn’t have happened if the school had valued compassionate, rational thinking rather than expecting teachers to be heuristic-driven drones that capitulate to the selfish needs of school boards and politicians.
And this kind of problem — this abdication of responsibility for fear of recrimination, by institutions that are supposed to embody all the best values of our society — is endemic to a society teetering ever nearer the edge of chaos.
Let me explain.
Pre-crime? Really?
Assuming Mr. Wilson’s account is accurate, and we have no reason to think it isn’t, his use of the would “could” troubling. It’s not that anyone was made uncomfortable actually by young Ms. Wilson’s sartorial choices, only that they “could” be made uncomfortable.
This means Ms. Wilson was punished for a hypothetical situation only. If you’re wondering why that’s a problem, read about “pre-crime”. Simply put, hypotheticals aren’t real; punishing someone for something that isn’t real is madness.
Furthermore, we can fairly infer that those who identified the hypothetical claimed a certain moral authority over Ms. Karis. Perhaps they thought they were genuinely preventing her from putting herself in harm’s way; perhaps they were trying to protect her immortal souls.
But they didn’t even bother finding a quiet moment to ask her about it. They should have. By all accounts, they would have realized nothing was amiss.
They just assumed she was going to “distract” others. This not only means they assumed Ms. Karis was either (a) too stupid or naive to recognize the potential distraction or (b) actually trying to distract others; this also means they believed they understood everyone else well enough to know they would be distracted. Without even bothering to ask.
That kind of arrogant sanctimony has no place in a school.
“Discomfort” is where we grow
Another very significant problem is the extent of harm that Ms. Wilson’s mistake is claimed to have hypothetically caused: her outfit could have made the teachers uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable? Just how psychologically delicate would a teacher have to be, to need protection from discomfort? Being an educator myself, I can assure you that our students’ attire doesn’t even rate on the scale of “shit we have to put up with”. To only have to tolerate the discomforting would be like winning a lottery!
What’s more, the notion that discomfort is a bad thing is ridiculous. Not harm, mind you; not trauma; not injury. Just discomfort. Discomfort is where most learning and growth happens. We learn and grow at the edges of our experience. Learning, they say, is about changing one’s mind when confronted with situations that challenge one’s beliefs. Growth comes from confronting one’s fears and ignorance, and from adapting one’s thinking and behaviour to better accommodate reality. We mustn’t fear discomfort, especially in education — we ought to welcome it and even seek it out.
Indeed, there are many ways to turn “uncomfortable moments” into “teachable moments”. Simply punting a student off to the principal definitely isn’t one of them.
Distractions are systemic
Presumably, the distraction claimed as grounds for barring Ms. Wilson’s attire connects to the existent dress code that bars clothing that “detracts from the teaching/learning process”. But that would be at best a very tenuous connection, because this kind of distraction is an emergent property complex interactions between multiple agents. Loud music distracts me when I’m working, but it doesn’t bother my wife very much at all. The distraction — the music — is only distracting to some people. Sure, some noises are loud and obnoxious enough to distract virtually anyone. But one cannot infer that all noises are distracting because some noises are, because different people have different thresholds of distraction.
It’s even more bizarre to make these false generalizations in Ms. Wilson’s case. In barring attire that may be detract from the learning environment, the rule covers every person who might possibly be distracted, yet leaves the instructor as final arbiter and absolute authority.
What if only some students are distracted and others are not? What if only one student is distracted? What if only one student claims to be distracted, but actually isn’t? What if the grounds for that distraction are petty, puerile, duplicitous, or vengeful? What if the teacher, or the principal, is a patriarchal prick or woefully under-qualified?
And why exactly should anyone be forced to alter their appearance because someone else is distracted by it without being able to quantify the nature and extent of that distraction?
The real problem here is that being distracted is a purely subjective matter that cannot be verified or even quantified. An appropriate dress code would quantify objectively verifiable aspects of dress that are permitted or not. One can then rationally discuss and evaluate specific items with respect to that code. This just isn’t possible when the code is so intellectually limp as to depend on vague phrases like “detracts from the teaching/learning process”.
Sexual repression anyone?
We don’t know what Ms. Wilson was thinking when she chose her wardrobe that day, nor do we need to know. She is by all accounts that I could find, a perfectly reasonable teenager.
Her teachers sexualized her attire, which led them to sexualize her. After all, you are what you wear, right?
They did not recognize their own sexualization of Ms. Wilson as inappropriate; rather, they transferred their repression and insecurities upon her. They believed she was being either promiscuous or naive. And we all know utterly incapable 17-year old women are to reason about their own safety, right?
Why not expect everyone else — especially the males in the school — recognize and respect Ms. Wilson’s privilege to dress as she will?
Finally, they applied their arrogant sanctimony in the form of intimidation. By sending Ms. Wilson to the principal, they not only made clear their intolerance but also sent a clear message to everyone else: power can and will be used without reason, so everyone else ought just keep their heads down and do what they’re told.
Plausible deniability
Any of the concerns noted above should be enough to identify the teachers’ actions as harmful and wrong, and the school board’s dress code as laughably vacuous.
The most troubling part of the incident to me, however, is how the teachers’ actions track back to the school’s need to maintain plausible deniability of any negligence or wrongdoing.
When something scandalous happens that involves a school (or any institution, really), the administration circles the wagons around themselves, leaving students outside the circle. Of course, the schools deny this; they’ll talk about quality of teaching, and privacy, and due process, and it will all sound wonderful. They might even throw a teacher under the bus… for the “greater good”.
What they’re doing, though, is gaming the system by ensuring plausible deniability of any fault by the school or the board. They’ll argue that the needs of the many (future generations of students) outweigh the needs of the few (current students). They’ll argue that the issue at hand is “complex” and requires “careful study” by a “committee of experts”. They might even argue that since the teachers received “proper training” to handle such situations, the school has discharged its responsibilities and will pursue “corrective actions”, which usually means the teacher is reprimanded, demoted, or fired.
No one asks what “proper training” means, though. If it’s anything like the soul-destroying time-sucks in which I’ve been forced to participate, then it’s bloody useless.
And unless and until a spotlight is pointed directly at the matter, as it was in Ms. Karis’s case, then nothing will change.
Guilty till proved innocent
Since we live in a world where even being accused of something is sufficient for a conviction in the court of public opinion, it doesn’t matter whether something bad actually happens or is only alleged to have happened — it is, unfortunately, equivalently scandalous.
Harm is bad. But more importantly in today’s world, harm requires blame to be affixed permanently to the harming agent. A Scarlet “H” to be worn literally forever. Even if some of us will forgive, the internet never forgets, and there will always be new people to discover a transgression and to replenish the cistern of outrage that their morality demands they feel, to feel they are good. Whether the harm was (allegedly) committed last week or last century, the outrage is forever.
And where there is harm, there is a lawsuit. That lawsuit will be against the agent of harm and, by extension, all those who are supposed to control the agent. Which means the school will inevitably be one of the defendants in said lawsuit. And even if the school isn’t part of the lawsuit per se, public opinion fires fanned by the media will drag the school into it.
The school is only interested in preserving its own reputation — more specifically, in preserving the reputation of its leaders, including its principal, the members of the school board under which it operates, and the sundry politicians at the pleasure of which those board members operate.
And while no lawsuits were filed in Ms. Wilson’s case, it is the fear of lawsuits that drives kafkaesque policies in our institutions.
And this is how it is pretty much the case everywhere in Canada, the US, and many other countries.
Everyone has skeletons in their closets, and the more power one has, the more “disastrous” it is when those closet doors are flung open. Lawsuits are great lock-picks. It stands to reason that all the people who might suffer collateral damage in a lawsuit will do whatever they can to avoid them, including coming up with byzantine rationalizations that allow them to avoid scrutiny regardless of the impact on the central actors.
In other words, schools will protect themselves at the expense of their students. They provide so many services and jobs, to so many people, and will do so for such a long time, that they are, as they say, too big to fail.
What if they did fail? Would we shut down the school system and require young people to all be home-schooled? Of course not. If they failed, a few people might lose their jobs, but education would continue. A governmental minister may be replaced. A school board may resign. But education would still continue.
What they fear is that they’ll be held responsible for the teacher’s actions — perhaps not in a court of law but in the court of public opinion. Add to this the media’s keen interest in creating sensationalistic situations for their own profit, and it’s easy to see how public opinion is at least as “dangerous” as the legal system for those in positions of power.
But that’s what power is! Power is the converse of responsibility. Ben Parker got it backwards: the aphorism should be “with great responsibility comes great power.” Unfortunately, much of our legal system and even our culture is based on the ancient principle (far older than Stan Lee’s popularization of it) that power creates responsibility rather than the other way around. Power without responsibility is for misanthropes and tyrants.
Teachers, in the meantime, are grossly underpaid, disrespected, and in many cases undertrained. Even if their intentions are good, many simply cannot handle even slightly atypical situations. And their employment contracts are relatively easy to terminate. It is quite natural for them to fear for their livelihood to the point that they will acquiesce to whatever draconian rules the principal/school board/politicians decide to implement.
Rules like prohibiting clothing that “detracts” from the educational environment.
Society is a sum of acts
Every tolerated public act is a reflection of the society in which it occurs.
What happened to Ms. Wilson happens all the time, in all kinds of ways, to all kinds of people. It happens because we no longer expect people to think for themselves, and we no longer prepare them to think for themselves and expect them to be responsible for their actions. (I’m referring to the teachers here, not Ms. Wilson.)
It used to be that religion and social class norms defined acceptable behaviours. It’s good that we’re moving away from those irrational, corrupt, and harmful structures, and we cannot go back to them if we want to continue to progress.
But we do need to replace them with something. We need to replace them with informed, compassionate, rational thinking. We cannot have people in authority, like teachers, working from intellectually stultified checklists and procedure manuals.
We already have the tools: science (especially systems dynamics and psychology), and applied philosophy and critical thinking, are the fundamentals.
Yet from designer hand sanitizers to McMansions, decadent irrationality is all around us. Every one of us who see this for what it is need to speak out, clearly and dispassionately — not only against the slide into oblivion, but for the sane, the rational, and the compassionate. We can’t just be crybabies, because all that will do is create a society of depressed, apathetic complainers.
In the case of Ms. Wilson, we need to explain to her teachers that their reactions were wrong, and to require them to demonstrate they understand how they should deal with similar situations in the future. We need a plan that addresses all the problems I’ve noted above, and all the other problems I missed. They needn’t be punished; that will achieve nothing. They do need to up their game, though. We need a public admission by the school principal of mismanagement of the case, and the announcement of clear, concrete steps that will be taken to ensure the kind of abuse Ms. Wilson had to ensure will not happen again to any student.
And that’s what we need everywhere. No recriminations, no cancellations, no job terminations — not unless absolutely necessary. Instead, let’s just fix the problem and move on. Life’s too short, and there’s too much to do to waste it on commissions, and investigations, and committee work.
