A big topic of conversation in our house is how much stricter English schools are than their American equivalents. What if, one of my children will say as we leave the house in the morning, I wore what I’m wearing to school in England? (You’d be sent home.) What if I wore my beanie in class? (You’d be told to take if off.) What if – the big one – I went to school in makeup and false nails, as some nine-year-olds in their school do? (I would probably get a call from the office and quite right, too.) “What about self-expression?” they complain, like diligent Americans, and I explain that this is not a priority in the English school system, besides which, wearing Air Jordans because “Ava does” isn’t what self-expression means.
These differences are, obviously, all uniform-based and elsewhere the two systems are clearly more aligned. In Mississippi this week, a news story to warm the heart as a seven-year-old was admonished by the teacher for “unacceptable language”, when, to quote the letter from the school his mother uploaded to Facebook, “he said Jesus Christ when he dropped the Legos he was clearing up”. The document the boy was sent home with fell under the rubric of “parent notice of disciplinary incident”, an over-reaction his family are objecting to in a post that has promptly gone viral.
