Schools Bans Facial Hair

A young man in Texas decided to let his wispy mustache grow - his school pulled him out of class and told him to shave it. Are there more important issues in the world? Of course.

Facial hair is a passion of mine. I hate, hate, being clean-shaven, and so I have done it up with huge sideburns, beards, goatees, and anything else that I could get away with. That a school district would claim dominion over a child’s maintenance of his own body, thus preventing the growth of facial hair, is absurd. Previously, I’ve angrily decried rules against t-shirts. This is arguably worse, because instead of school telling a student what clothes he can put on her body, it is telling him what to do to his own body. Schools simply do not enjoy this dominion. A child’s face is his own, and as soon as a school claims the right to shave the kid, surely it will also enjoy the authority to cut his hair, the power to trim his nails, and the strength to do any number of other things.

Besides the intrusion into the lives of these young men - seriously, does a school enjoy the right to tell children what they can and cannot do on their own time? - there is a social issue here about facial hair. My friend Stewart rightly argues that facial hair grows naturally. It is unnatural that it be shaved. We already live in a society in which facial hair is viewed as being something problematic. Now we have schools requiring that young men remove any facial hair that grows immediately, despite the fact that the human condition grows facial hair. Thousands of children (this has apparently been a school policy forever) are growing up believing that facial hair is bad, and not exploring its possibilities during the point in their lives when they’re most likely to decide if they’ll be lifelong growers or lifelong shavers. This is nightmarish.

We don’t need a society of people that look the same. We don’t need a society of people that act the same. And we certainly don’t need yet another policy in which children are treated as pieces of property by schools districts anxious to churn out a graduating class that all looks the same. If individual freedom matters at all, then this is a policy that must be immediately abandoned. To do anything else is unnatural.