Rosemary McLeod: Brave student faces attack of clones

Lucan Battison took on St John's College over the length of his hair and the court found in his favour.

When the world knows what misery a bad hair day is I'm amazed at how many people wished one on a harmless teenager at St John's College.

What nonsense that battle was. Did the eternal fear of independent-minded teenagers underpin it, or was it the usual wish to clobber people who stick their neck out?

Everyone knows what a bad hair day is because we've all had one and it's grim until it grows out. I once had a perm so frightful that I wore pigtails for a year before finally cutting my hair off very short when the damn thing still refused to disappear.

That meant another year of growing it back so I had a bad hair day on 365 days, twice. It's amazing that I survived the trauma.

At my boarding school, girls with short hair had to have it clear their collar by an inch, meaning girls with short necks practically had to have the backs of their heads shaved.

They cried, knowing they looked ugly, and who could blame them?

The point? We weren't army recruits, there was no epidemic of nits to contend with, it was a rule simply because you have petty school rules so kids can be forced to bow to authority, that unpleasant word a hair's breadth away from repression.

That's pretty much what the Battison family was dealing with and a lesser family would have chucked it in.

It's tyranny to make rules and then extend them at a whim, as seems to have happened in Lucan's case.

His hair didn't flop into his face and it was short, which should have complied with school rules. But it was thick and curly and that must have annoyed the headmaster. There was no actual rule about having thick, curly hair, as far as I can tell, probably because anyone would see at once that it was ridiculous.

Why no hair on the face anyway and why would it all have to be short? It might make sense in some industrial situations, but workers for whom that would be a hazard wear protective gear anyway. Otherwise your hairdo is nobody else's business, no matter what age you are. Yet some schools expect kids to abandon individuality and become clones, and they shouldn't get away with it.

The consensus among commentators seemed to be that young people will face rules and regulations once they leave school, but I wonder what form they would take, and doubt very much that haircuts would feature often.

The current social trend is towards increasing rights and freedoms, another of the worries expressed. If boys can choose what they look like, that thinking goes, the future will be terrifying.

Most irritating among media commentators was the eternally irritating Nigel Latta.

His argument, I gathered, was that it was wrong for Lucan to argue about his school suspension in court because other schools would be affected by the outcome and that would be a bad thing.

But where human dignity and the right to self-expression is at stake, you have every right - even a responsibility - to act. If all the schools in the country are affected by Lucan's victory they were all legally in the wrong in the first place and should have to change.

I don't buy another argument either, so often presented to me in my rebellious school days: "What if everybody wanted to do this?"

Well, let them, was always my reasonable reply, and detention invariably followed. What I learned from that was that people will use arbitrary powers and be unreasonable if they're bigger than you, and can. There's no intellectual satisfaction, however, in that universal truth.

Lucan seems like a nice kid. He has nothing bad to say about the school and was keen to get back to schoolwork and rugby after his long suspension. And this is the kind of kid you punish? How bizarre.

Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.