Editorial Tuesday July 1, 2014

Peter Jackson, editor, The Northland Age

NAPIER school boy Lucan Battison would not have made the news if he'd been growing up in the 1960s. Rather than appealing to the High Court for the right to grow his hair contrary to his school's rules, or more accurately perhaps contrary to the standard set by his principal, he would likely have been ordered by his parents to do as he was told.

That was a mantra in the 1960s. Parents then didn't do rebellion, in any form. Kids were expected to comply with Authority, whatever form that took. In early childhood it was Mum and Dad who made the decisions, but as children grew older authority expanded, taking in teachers, policemen, in fact almost any adult, who would generally be regarded as having a wiser head, and more reliable judgement, than any common or garden child.

There might well have been parents of the Battisons' ilk, forerunners of the huge swing we have seen away from parental control and towards child rights, but they would have been a very small minority. For most kids, and childhood lasted longer in the the 1960s than it seems to now, adults were the first and last arbiters of what was right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. And in the writer's experience parents were much more likely to throw their weight behind an authority figure outside the home than to take the side of their child.

Having said that, once the furore over this boy's hair reached the High Court he was always going to win. According to what we've been told, St John's College requires hair to be out of the eyes and off the collar. Lucan's hair appeared to meet both those requirements, even when it wasn't tied up in a bun, so he wasn't actually breaking the rule. He had reportedly escaped censure for three years, until the arrival of a new principal, and that was when the manure hit the air conditioning. In the 1960s headmasters, as they were known then, had the parent-given right to set all sorts of standards, capricious as some of those might have seemed to his/her charges.

In those days school rules, written or otherwise, did not need to be so carefully compiled that they could be expected to survive the scrutiny of the High Court. Headmasters and teachers made the rules, students were expected to comply with them, parents could be relied upon to back the school, end of story. How things have changed.

The writer had a particularly memorable encounter with Kaitaia College's rule against the cultivation of facial hair in 1968. As he emerged from a School Certificate exam in the college hall he was accosted by a teacher, one Mr Price, who grabbed him by one ear (assault?), twisted it to the point of inflicting some discomfort (assault with intent to injure?) and told him to go home, take up his father's razor and get that "muck" off his face. Said "muck" took the form of embryonic sideboards, which had yet to be disturbed by a razor of any ownership.

Protestations that he was due back in the hall after lunch for another exam fell on deaf ears, as did promises to remove the bum fluff, as it would have been described then, overnight. He was told that he would be doing nothing, including sitting an exam, until his face was clean-shaven.

So the 15-year-old, who for all Mr Price knew might have lived well out of town, hot footed it home, about a mile away, to shave. Not unexpectedly, his mother wanted to know what he was doing when he staggered through the door. The situation explained, she told her son to hurry up and shave and get back in time for the next exam. No phone call to the college. No mention of mediation, lawyers or courts. Not even the offer of a ride back. Just the familiar instruction to do as he had been told.

Incidentally, one Warren Matthews, now resident at Tokerau Beach in unquestioned respectability, cultivated a moustache while he was at Kaitaia College. He got away with it for some time, covering it each day with a sticking plaster (band aid in modern terminology). It was a dangerous game though, and, inevitably, one day a teacher ripped the plaster away to reveal his secret. The moustache disappeared very quickly. Not sure if Warren was caned for his especially egregious breach of etiquette, but it would not have been surprising if he was.

Nowadays, of course, parents leap to the defence of their golden children at every opportunity, although one wonders if they are doing their offspring any favours. The late Keith Parker, who returned to the North after a career in banking to write about the history of Kaitaia, once said that his generation had been oppressed by their parents. Certainly kids of his generation were expected to be seen and not heard (another mantra), and many young men would have well and truly been shaving before they were considered entitled to have an opinion about anything more consequential than the likelihood of rain, but they were probably better prepared for adulthood than many modern teenagers.

How Lucan Battison wears his hair is of no great moment, but his challenging of authority is. Those who say that silly rules, which those governing hair might or might not be, foment rebellion and should be dispensed with, are missing the point. Those who fret that a successful challenge over hair might lead to more disobedience on the part of students who don't like their school uniform, for instance, are getting warmer. The major issue though must be how this experience has helped prepare Lucan Battison, and no doubt others of his generation, for life after school.

At 16, Lucan Battison is a boy, with much still to learn, inside and outside school, and however strongly he feels, he does not make the rules. He will discover this when he begins working for a living. Whatever he does to earn a crust, whoever pays his wages will want to be in charge. How will he react should he decide that his employer's expectations are unreasonable? Hiving off to the High Court will probably not serve him as well as it has on this occasion.

Lucan Battison and others of his ilk need to understand that growing up is a lengthy process. If they believe they have been subjected to genuine injustice then they should be commended for objecting, but a school's rules regarding hair, and the incumbent principal's interpretation of those rules, do not constitute genuine injustice. And it behoves these youngsters' parents to support the rule and the people who make them, at least in front of the children. Lucan Battison's parents would have taught their son a much more valuable lesson had they required him to obey the rules, then, if so moved, supported him in making a considered case for those rules to be changed.

This spat over hair at a Napier school may not lead to the end of civilisation as we know it, but it will have reinforced the harmful notion that children have much greater power than is good for them, or for society

. At 16 life has barely begun; there is plenty of time to begin making a statement vias our physical appearance. Devolving authority to boys who should still be doing as they are told does them, and us, no favours.