To the best of my recollection, there was no dress code for kids when I was in elementary school. There was in junior high school, which I will describe below. Sometime during ninth grade, which for me was in high school, as the junior high had converted to being a middle school by then, the dress code was dropped, as a result of the ethos of the time. The Vietnam War had created a huge reaction and spawned social change. How we dressed was part of that. My interest here is before that. Things like dress codes exist for a reason. What was the reason then? I'm going to speculate about that here. I'm also going to talk about this as trying to understand my own development during that time.
Why bother? For me, better understanding myself as a kid helps in figuring out how I am now. Each of us is the product of our own past. Some revelation of that past can then be brought to the present by increased self-awareness and perhaps change in behavior in the here and now as a consequence.
Here's a little bit of an aside that might help. It's about our notions of intelligence and how it is determined. Current thinking, as exemplified by the work of Carol Dweck, is quite different from how we thought of intelligence when I was a kid. According to Dweck, intelligence is an attitudinal thing. If you have the growth mindset, you then are willing to put in the time and effort for the practice needed to learn something new and with that learning you do grow. The learning thus confirms the growth attitude. In contrast, if you have the fixed mindset, I'm not good at that, then you don't practice much at all and don't get any learning as a result. That too confirms the prior attitude. When I was a kid we thought about intelligence as largely genetically determined and a fixed attribute, so your IQ was the same throughout your life. But unlike hair color, which clearly is genetically determined and does differentiate us some, intelligence apparently differentiated us vertically. Having a higher IQ was equivalent to being smarter than the other person. While in some cultural environments intelligence is not prized, so a smart kid might dumb himself down to be more acceptable to others, among the Jewish kids I knew when I was growing up intelligence was prized. Parents wanted their kids to be smart as benefit to the kids, but also as confirmation about themselves.
Now let me get to the punchline and then circle back to personalize all of this. While kids differ in the age at which they enter puberty, if school is to make adjustments in how they go about things, they have to do it based on grade level, or on even coarser considerations, elementary school versus junior high school, for example. So think of elementary school as for prepubescent kids while junior high school was for kids who have entered puberty. Considered in this light, the dress code is an increase in the rules that kids must abide by. Making the rules overt, which the dress code surely did, is a way to enforce authority and to quash student expression via appearance. This direct effect might have also had an indirect effect on students, who were just becoming aware of their own sexuality. At least with regard to time in school, the school was signaling that more prudish behavior was preferred.
For the boys, there was some "cheating" with the requirement. Some kids wore clip-on ties. One or two wore bow ties, which were also clip on. And there were these tie-like things, I'm not sure what they were called, that did go around the neck and then you snapped it together to form an inverse V. Wearing a tie necessitated wearing a button down shirt. Further, jeans and sneakers were not allowed. The norm was to have pants too short by what's considered appropriate today*, with white sweat socks, the tops of which were clearly visible, and penny loafers to complete the look. For the girls, they had to wear skirts and blouses. Pants weren't allowed, which especially in wintertime seemed quite unfair. The "solution" was pantyhose. Had it been the girls who wore pants and the boys who wore skirts, at least that part of the dress code would have been knocked down years earlier.
There were several other factors where elementary school differed from junior high school. Here are a few to consider. In elementary school, it was not uncommon for some kids in the classroom to be doing one activity while other kids were doing something else. The easiest of these to remember was painting at an easel. Our classrooms had a limited number of stations for painting, maybe two or three, that were located in a back corner of the room. We also had time in class for reading, which was either a book of our own choice from the school library (individualized reading) or SRA reading, which was color coded by how proficient the kid was then. Students in different color codes got reading passages of different difficulty levels. Of course, we did have ensemble activities as well. Spelling was one of the those, with the pre-test on Monday and the re-test on Friday, where all of us had to master the same list of words. Junior high featured much less (and possibly none) of the small group activity where kids did different things across the groups and much more of the ensemble activity. So kids in junior high may have become more aware of the performance of other kids in their class as a result.
Further, junior high featured explicit tracking when I was a student. If there was tracking in elementary school (and there might not have been) it was invisible to the students. In junior high there was something called SP (special progress) which separated students out by academic performance. There were two flavors. I was in the 3-year SP, which emphasized enrichment in the teaching. There was also 2-year SP, which compressed 3 years of schooling into 2 years, so the emphasis was on acceleration.** The consequence of SP was to create a school-within-a-school effect, where SP kids were the elite students. I started junior high in 1966. Busing to achieve desegregation in the NYC schools started perhaps a year earlier. SP predates that, which I know because my sister, who is 5 years my senior, was also in SP. So SP was not designed with the aim of thwarting desegregation, but it may have inadvertently done that. There were very few Black students in SP when I was in junior high.
Junior high also had numerical grades, from which a GPA could be computed. In elementary school, we did get report cards, which included categories for which grades were assigned (Excellent, Good, Fair, or Unsatisfactory) and for which the teacher might write a brief comment, but there was no converting of those grades into numerical equivalents. There is no doubt that numerical grades make students more grade conscious. We should ask whether that is a feature or a bug. Overall, I can't say. But it did have a profound effect on me, as I will illustrate.
Until yesterday, I was under the impression that puberty and academic performance were two entirely separate things. Then, while having an extended thread with a classmate from 7th grade, it occurred to me (Why? I don't know.) that maybe they are connected in an important way. So I did some Google searches to see if this has been investigated. I looked at several documents, which somewhat differ in their conclusions, suggesting that maybe it matters when in the school career of the kid one takes a look. Among these papers this one was the most interesting to me, The relationship between pubertal hormones and brain plasticity: Implications for cognitive training in adolescence. I won't claim that I read it carefully. But I garnered from it that it is possible for puberty to be the cause of an "intellectual growth spurt," depending on other factors as well. I started puberty quite early. I wrote about that in this post. This is the relevant paragraph.
Those questions begin, I believe, with the onset of
puberty, especially as how the time of that compares with the times for
others in the kid's cohort. For me, it started quite early, when I was
nine. I was kicked out of choir in fourth grade because my voice broke
then, much like the kid in Almost Angels.
There was one other kid, Jay S, who was in the same boat. We were
separated from the rest of the class, when it was in choir practice. I
understood this separation wasn't punitive. But it reinforced a feeling
of being different from others. (Being one of the biggest was what
generated that sense of being different. So I already had some of this
feeling since nursery school.) The first meaning of life question,
then, was how to regard this difference and not feel shame about it,
which I surely did feel at the time. I have since confronted this
feeling of being different in several other areas. I probably wasn't
ready in fourth grade to consider it a theme that might focus reading
and writing. But by high school I was. However, I had nobody like Mr.
Conrad to intrude on my thinking and direct it in this area.
I believe I had an intellectual growth spurt soon thereafter. An issue for me that I don't have completely resolved in my head is whether my teachers took note of my early puberty and directed my school activity accordingly.*** I am quite sure that in 6th grade, where my teacher was also the school librarian, I spent an inordinate time outside of the classroom and in the library. At least some of that time was to place the plastic coverings on the book jackets of newly received books. But much of it must have been to do independent reading on my own. I will never know why Mr. Sachar selected me for this, but I'm now very grateful that he did. I was able to develop at my own pace. At the time, I had no clue how that compared with the pace of other students, so social concerns didn't impede me in any way then. And I developed a very strong sense of directing my own learning, which is something I believe each kid needs to develop, though nowadays it is comparatively rare.
I'm also of the mind now that I probably repressed any explicit form of sexual expression in fifth and sixth grades, which was my way to deal with my puberty when my classmates weren't there yet. It may have been a sensible thing to do at the time, but it probably began a battle between my conscious self and my subconscious being, which persisted for many years thereafter, well into adulthood.
With this as setup, I now want to consider a novel thought for me, that my performance in junior high school was a kind of sexual expression, one that my subconscious directed. I want to note two things about that performance. After the first marking period in 7th grade, we had assembly in the auditorium where the school principal called me up to the front of the room because I had the highest GPA among all the 7th graders. From then I was branded as a very smart kid. Also, in class, particularly in social studies, I raised my hand a lot in response to questions from the teacher. I don't recall specifically if this was just to give the "right answer" or instead to embellish on the topic more broadly. I'm guessing now, without remembering exactly, that I did some of both. It's more the hand raising and my responses to the teacher that I'm thinking of as a kind of sexual expression.
Yet consciously, it was just me being me. At that level I'm quite sure I was not trying to impress my classmates. Was that naiveté or something else? I did learn near the end of 7th grade that it can cut the other way. We had autograph books which we got others in our class to sign, after saying something they felt about the person. One girl wrote that I made her feel uncomfortable in class. Had I gotten many such comments, I might have changed my in-class behavior. With just this one comment, while it bothered me, I didn't make any adjustment at all.
Some years later, definitely before college, I read On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, which was a study of the animal kingdom, of which we humans are members. It features a concept called territoriality, which helps to explain within-species aggression. I'm the king of my own zone. If you stay outside my zone you and I are fine. But if you cross into my zone I will fight you. Here I'm using the first person singular to generalize to any animal who will defend his turf. The book goes beyond this particular concept and discusses particular examples of animal life, for example, mating rituals. One that illustrates matters quite nicely is the behavior of peacocks, who strut in order to entice peahens to be their mates. Later in life I've referred to the analogous behavior in human beings as "plumage." My classroom behavior in 7th grade seems an almost perfect example, in retrospect, although I really wasn't aware of it at the time. But it may very well have been the subconscious driver behind the urge to raise my hand to respond to the teacher's question.
Alas, even if I did make a strong (and good) impression on some of the girls in the class then, I didn't know how to close the deal, and felt myself unattractive, both for being very big and because I was a klutz physically. I wrote about this in my previous post, but there I focused on the time from college onward. Some of the same issues were there, even in 7th grade, which is what gave the impetus for this post.
We don't get to relive our lives over again, where in the encore we've learned from our mistakes made the first time through. But we can share some memories with our friends who were there with us. Recently, I've been doing that with some friends from junior high school. It gives me a warm feeling now to do that. I hope it's the same for them.
Adolescence is such a struggle. It is said that struggle makes you stronger. If eventually a spouse is found, this particular struggle makes you more compassionate, at least it did for me. Nowadays, I believe it's good to think of strength as compassion.
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*Since the kids were growing in those years, the pants might have been more than long enough when purchased originally, with an inner or outer cuff for the extra material, to be let out after the kid grew a few inches.
** There were three 2-year SP classes and four 3-year SP classes at JHS 74 when I was there. Some years ago I scanned our yearbook, Insights 68. The class photos start on page 58, with the 2-year SP 9th graders. It seems that those classes were somewhat larger (35 or 36 students) than the 3-year SP classes (about 27 students). If you do look at those photos note that each page is within its own folder and you want the image that has larger file size, the second one in the folder. Also, after you've opened the file to view the image, near the bottom there is a control that is evident if you mouse over it. You can expand or shrink the size of the image with that control.
*** I believe placement into SP was generated by performance on a standardized test, the score on which was not made known to the student. Conceivably, I had a very high score and that, rather than the evident puberty, was something the teachers were aware of.
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