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Ask Miss Manners?
On the radio today, I caught a bit more or less about teaching etiquette to kids. I only caught the tail end of it, so I'm missing a lot of context, but I was reminded of a minor controversy this year at my school: whether students are allowed to wear hats or not. In the past, we had a classroom-by-classroom system of rules, in which some teachers nixed hats and other didn't, but this year it was decided that some uniformity was in order, so hats came off. Certain segments of the student population were, predictably, outraged by this attack on their liberty. Hats, they argued, are an integral form of self-expression, implicitly covered in the right to free speech and the school's own general principle of encouraging students to express themselves.
I've always thought this was a rather goofy claim, in that what is expressed on one's cap is almost always extremely superficial. Wow, you're a Red Sox fan. In New England, no less. That hat sure does speak volumes about who you really are.
The con argument hasn't, to my knowledge, really been spelled out; I've heard something to the effect that some teachers are concerned about kids hiding behind their hats, pulling them down over their eyes and disconnecting. For my part, the issue always seemed to be one of proper etiquette. I mean, taking a hat off inside a building is just what you do. Doing otherwise is somehow impolite. I had this ingrained in me thoroughly enough that I feel physically uncomfortable if I have a hat on my head when I'm inside a building. It doesn't matter if I haven't sat down yet, it doesn't matter how bad my hair looks--the hat has to come off.
Now, I recognize that this is an arbitrary social convention. Who is one actually being rude to, and why is it considered rude? Most people under 30 (and probably a fair number over) probably don't even consider it impolite. So what's the big deal?
At the same time, it's not like it's a Herculean task to remove one's hat when entering a building, so why not just take off the hat? If it annoys even one person and unfavorably predisposes them to you, well, why take that risk just to wear a hat?
For my own part, even though I'm almost neurotic about my own hat, I'm not inherently bothered by someone else wearing a hat. I enforce the rule at school, but I wouldn't be up in arms if the rule was changed, yet a part of me thinks it's a good rule, if it makes kids conscious of the etiquette of wearing a hat. To them, though, it just seems arbitrary (which it is, in its way), but designating something as arbitrary mean it must be tossed out or ignored.
I don't really have any definite conclusions here; I'm just thinking on the page. Your thoughts, as always, are most appreciated.