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End of the Old School Tie?
Monday, May 18th, 2009 03:45 pmAlways ready to panic over some change in British society, the Daily Telegraph reports on the alarming trend of schools replacing the traditional school tie with—can you believe it?—clip-ons. For a change, I agree with the Telegraph: this is utterly absurd. Two reasons are given by school heads. The first is that ties often "look scruffy as pupils wear fat knots or short tails as part of the latest fashion craze." True enough, except that (a) pupils have always been doing this, so there's nothing "latest" about it, and (b) if a fifteen-year-old boy doesn't look scruffy, that is when you should start worrying. The lads with perfectly pressed shirts who spend half an hour in the toilets slicking back their hair are the ones you should keep an eye on; they probably have a dozen third-years selling skunk for them.
The second and more pressing reason is that ties can violate health and safety regulations. I kid you not: they can get caught in machinery, and "concerns have been raised over children pulling them too tight for a joke." Ah yes, I remember how we used to pull our chums ties until their faces went blue and their eyes popped out—hilarious it was. It seems that, like other jolly old traditions such as sodomy with a Curly Wurly, this is unacceptable to namby-pamby progressive educators. Now you might think the solution was simple: instruct pupils to remove their ties while operating lathes (not something they need to do very often, unless the curriculum has got considerably less academic since I left school) and devise a suitable punishment for those who strangle their classmates. Putting their heads in a plastic bag for a while should do the trick. But no, we need to live in a Britain Where Bad Things Do Not Happen, so clip-ons are the obvious solution: safe, easy to use … and totally wanky. I mean it was bad enough having to wear a school tie, but a clip-on school tie? A clip-on school tie that sends a clear message to every bully within eye-shot: "Rip me off, throw me in the air, then trample me underfoot"? Have a heart.
Of course this begs the question of why, in the twenty-first century, any schools would want their pupils to wear ties. Ties first became fashionable in the 1630s (thanks to Croatian mercenaries, hence the word "Cravat"). They've had their day. If we're going to insist on ties, we may as well have britches and shoes with big buckles. The only reason why school ties didn't die out a few decades ago is Harry Potter.
Harry Potter can also be blamed for another disturbing trend in schools: the revival of the house system. This originated in private schools (which we Brits confusingly call "public schools") and was meant fairly literally: boys were incarcerated in large houses where they would sleep, study and engage in sado-masochistic homosexual behaviour. This naturally supported good-natured competition, fair play and grievous bodily harm, as boys from rival houses would while away the summer afternoons clubbing each other with cricket bats. When state education got going, the more pretentious grammar schools emulated this system, even though there were no actual houses. When I was a lad, we had houses, but they were really just an attempt to find names catchier than 3A or 5C (we had Abbey, Castle and Quarry, named after local landmarks). No one had any doubts that the system was a feeble attempt to imitate the world of Tom Brown's Schooldays, a world that had been dealt a death blow by WWI and by the 1960s was just hanging on in a coma. But then along came Harry Potter, and now, the same Telegraph article reports, the Schoolwear Association notes that an increasing number of schools are adopting the house system and "ordering ties, polo shirts and scarves in house colours to differentiate between pupils" (emphasis mine). This, my dear readers, is madness. It won't be like Gryffindor and Hufflepuff; it'll be like the Sharks and the Jets or the Crips and the Bloods.
The second and more pressing reason is that ties can violate health and safety regulations. I kid you not: they can get caught in machinery, and "concerns have been raised over children pulling them too tight for a joke." Ah yes, I remember how we used to pull our chums ties until their faces went blue and their eyes popped out—hilarious it was. It seems that, like other jolly old traditions such as sodomy with a Curly Wurly, this is unacceptable to namby-pamby progressive educators. Now you might think the solution was simple: instruct pupils to remove their ties while operating lathes (not something they need to do very often, unless the curriculum has got considerably less academic since I left school) and devise a suitable punishment for those who strangle their classmates. Putting their heads in a plastic bag for a while should do the trick. But no, we need to live in a Britain Where Bad Things Do Not Happen, so clip-ons are the obvious solution: safe, easy to use … and totally wanky. I mean it was bad enough having to wear a school tie, but a clip-on school tie? A clip-on school tie that sends a clear message to every bully within eye-shot: "Rip me off, throw me in the air, then trample me underfoot"? Have a heart.
Of course this begs the question of why, in the twenty-first century, any schools would want their pupils to wear ties. Ties first became fashionable in the 1630s (thanks to Croatian mercenaries, hence the word "Cravat"). They've had their day. If we're going to insist on ties, we may as well have britches and shoes with big buckles. The only reason why school ties didn't die out a few decades ago is Harry Potter.
Harry Potter can also be blamed for another disturbing trend in schools: the revival of the house system. This originated in private schools (which we Brits confusingly call "public schools") and was meant fairly literally: boys were incarcerated in large houses where they would sleep, study and engage in sado-masochistic homosexual behaviour. This naturally supported good-natured competition, fair play and grievous bodily harm, as boys from rival houses would while away the summer afternoons clubbing each other with cricket bats. When state education got going, the more pretentious grammar schools emulated this system, even though there were no actual houses. When I was a lad, we had houses, but they were really just an attempt to find names catchier than 3A or 5C (we had Abbey, Castle and Quarry, named after local landmarks). No one had any doubts that the system was a feeble attempt to imitate the world of Tom Brown's Schooldays, a world that had been dealt a death blow by WWI and by the 1960s was just hanging on in a coma. But then along came Harry Potter, and now, the same Telegraph article reports, the Schoolwear Association notes that an increasing number of schools are adopting the house system and "ordering ties, polo shirts and scarves in house colours to differentiate between pupils" (emphasis mine). This, my dear readers, is madness. It won't be like Gryffindor and Hufflepuff; it'll be like the Sharks and the Jets or the Crips and the Bloods.
