5 Responses to “RELOADED: Non-Discipline Day”Leave a ReplyYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
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Scenes From The Battleground
A Blog About Teaching in Tough Schools in the UK
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March 7th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
“Rules are not something that can be switched on and off. It makes no more sense to have a day when the uniform rules are relaxed than it would be to have a day where students are encouraged to skip lessons, break windows or burn down the canteen.”
Many workplaces do this, which leads me to think that your argument here is in some way fallacious. Let us apply this reasoning to other rule changes:
“It makes no more sense to have a day when you do not come into school than it would be to have a day where students eat pebbles.”
“It makes no more sense to have a day when you do a large cross-school sporting activity than it would be to have a day where students do hurdles in class.”
“It makes no more sense that a student should be allowed to go home when ill or affected by a personal event than it would be to…”
And so on.
Rules can be consistent but yet change – e.g. they can change consistently. So we can have weekends off consistently, have sports days consistently, and allow students personal space consistently.
In this way we can have a day without uniform without any inconsistency in rules. Instead, we can make rules that are adaptive to different circumstances (which we necessarily have anyway).
The other reasons for not liking no-uniform days are valid, but are not because rules have been somehow changed on these days. Instead, the rules themselves allow the change.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
You appear to have written 250 words to explain that there are exceptions to every rule.
The point you appear to have missed is that if there are good reasons to have a rule requiring school uniforms generally, then those reasons still apply on non-uniform day (assuming that non-uniform day is in all respects a normal school day except for the lack of uniforms).
March 10th, 2008 at 9:24 am
Reductio ad absurdum: “If there are good reasons to have a rule requiring that there is not stopping on a motorway generally, then those reasons still apply in a traffic jam.”
As in the above reason, there can be good reasons to do something usually but also good reasons to not do it sometimes.
However, I do appreciate your comments regarding some students using it as an excuse to act like idiots (not that they often fail to take the chance anyway). Perhaps it would help if schools with bad behaviour only employed the chance to raise money for charity through non-uniform days as a reward for improved behaviour in school?
March 10th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
You seem determined to make out that claiming rules often have exceptions is some kind of great insight.
My point is not that there are never or can never be exceptions to rules, just that there should be unavoidable circumstances that require the exception. Non-uniform days are completely avoidable.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
The situation you describe in ‘5′ was pretty much the situation in my school, until heads of department complained.
It really was ridiculous: we were struggling to get kids (and parents) to comply with our dress code, and then giving kiddies permission to wear what they wanted, provided they handed over 50p for charity. Then, when kids refused to hand over the dosh, nowt was done.