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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Should we Shear the Young Sheep?

Should we Shear the Young Sheep?

The way people dress; the way that they speak; the way they wear their hair – since the world began these non-essentials have been perhaps the main source of friction between one group and another.

Is a Negro man your equal? No, of course not; he has dark features and a different kind of hair from the kind my father had. Are the Quakers any good? No – how could they be? They don’t take off their hats and they address one another as Thee and Thou. Could you ever become a Catholic? God help me, no! Just look at the way their priests and nuns and Brothers dress! Black is the colour of death. What secretive, gloomy lives they must lead.

This wholly irrational concentration on non-essentials is one of the chief reasons for divisions among the whole body of Christian believers. Many members of the Greek Church, for example, would feel that a clean-shaven man was devoid of masculine authority. The priest’s beard is a symbol of his pastoral role. Does this mean that Pope Paul should immediately grow a beard? Perhaps it does.

I think that the basic rule in such matters should be one of absolute tolerance. If God is not offended by the presence or absence of a beard, or the kind and colour of clothes a man wears, or his particular way of walking and talking, why on earth should we be offended? Do we count ourselves more discriminating than God?

The issue came up long ago at the birth of the Church when St Peter received a brotherly rebuke from St Paul (and Peter was the Pope, let us remember that) for insisting that Gentile converts should bow to Jewish page 574 custom and be circumcised. St Paul won the day because charity should lead us to allow the utmost variety in non-essentials, even when our own private prejudice would lead in the opposite direction.

Recently I allowed my son to withdraw from a secular school and take a job and go to night school instead. Before this happened he had been suspended several times for wearing his hair long – not down to his waist, but the same length that every boy you meet wears it these days. He had begun to object to being grabbed by the hair in the school corridor and told he should have it cut.

Now, the reason I am bringing the subject up is not just because my son had a bit of a brawl with his teachers. I know quite well that many boys in Catholic schools are having similar arguments. And I want to express my own honest views on the situation.

I am totally indifferent as to how long people have their hair. But I am by no means indifferent to unnecessary argument and acrimony in the Church, particularly when it involves adolescents. All people are capable of being emotional; and adolescents are capable of being twice as emotional as other people. I am all for treating them with the utmost care and prudence. And this is not just because I like them better than I like most adults.

It is our duty before God to do our utmost to prevent our fellow-Catholics from lapsing; and practically every lapsed Catholic I have ever met attributed his or her departure from the Church to some kind of mishandling during adolescence. They may, in some instances, have been rationalising after the event. But I take it that there was a large grain of truth in their comment.

I could simply have told my son to go and get his hair cut. Indeed I did that at first. I accompanied him to the barber and exchanged a couple of conciliatory notes with the College Principal. After all (I reasoned) the Principal was only doing his job. There was a school regulation that boys should not wear their hair down to their collars or over their ears; and it was his responsibility to enforce this regulation.

Then I began to give the matter a little more thought. I began to ask myself why this regulation existed, and came to the conclusion that it was solely because of custom. The hair of schoolboys had always been cut short. Therefore it had to remain short. There was no moral issue, as there would be if it had involved conduct between the sexes; there was no issue of health as there would be in the case of smoking habits. It was a matter of pure obedience.

All I could say to my son was: ‘The school demands you should have your hair cut. Therefore you must have it cut.’ And commands which cannot be backed by reason do not go down well with adolescents. They want to be treated as people.

Then I began to notice that practically all the young men I met – those in offices, those in shops, those who worked in street excavations – were wearing page 575 their hair a trifle longer than my boy was wearing his. Plainly he was trying to conform to the fashion prevalent among his age group. Still, fashion isn’t everything. I put it to him: ‘There’s no logical reason for the regulation. Personally I think it’s idiotic. But the regulation does exist and they’re not likely to change it. You need to go to school to pass your School Cert. Why can’t you just forget about it and fit in?’

The answer was not wholly expected. He pointed out that if he went to a dance he would be at a social disadvantage with short hair. He would be an oddity. He would bear the indelible mark of being a schoolboy. Girls would be less ready to dance with him.

I had indeed noticed that the last time I had forced him to have his hair cut, he had come away from the barber’s saying mournfully: ‘Sandra won’t like this!’ Sandra being his current girl-friend.

It was at this point that he won me over to his side of the argument. I knew that each day when he came home from school, he changed rapidly from his school uniform into jeans and bare feet and polo neck jersey, a combination which suited him admirably and which I too found pleasing. But he could not miraculously convert his short hair into long hair. The school chose to regard short hair as part of the school uniform. But a uniform which cannot be put off when the boy is away from school is something of a straitjacket. I could see his point of view.

On the other hand, I could also see the point of view of his teachers. Middle-aged people in a difficult job, perhaps maintaining control in the classroom with some effort, they would tend to look on the adolescents under their control as an explosive mixture. God only knows what fantasies might pass through their minds. Perhaps some of them associated long hair with loose sexual morals and drugtaking.

The association is unwarranted. Our Lord probably wore His hair down to His shoulders. Nevertheless few people, adolescent or adult, are able to think rationally. Some of the teachers may even have had an unconscious envy of these vivid, lively, free-talking, aggressive adolescents. The length of hair became somehow a symbol of the maintenance of control.

Personally I am of the opinion that the length of a boy’s hair should be decided, if by any authority, then solely by his parents. In my own case I did not have the faintest objection to my boy having long hair. My strictly non-mystical view of the matter was that I had sent him to school to acquire an education and pass certain necessary examinations. I could not see that long hair would be an obstacle to the acquisition of a knowledge of French verbs, or that it would turn him into a bank-robber.

In fact I felt that the hair-cutting regulation, rigidly applied, was itself an educational obstacle because it increased the difficulty of pupil-teacher relationships. The teachers have a mystique. They want to present to the world a particular image of the school. The adolescents have a mystique. They want page 576 to present to the world a particular image of themselves. The school image can have a bad influence, as when it involves militarism and prudery and bigotry. The adolescent image can also be harmful, if it involves the young in endless petulance and extravagance and moral laxness.

But most of what is involved in both images is morally neutral. As a parent who cannot afford the luxury of a mystique I am deeply irritated that teachers should be stupid enough to let the two mystiques collide head-on in an area which is, in fact, morally neutral. It has cost me a good deal of worry and inconvenience, and some financial loss; though no doubt my son will be a good deal better off working for his living and paying his own fees and free of the intellectually inhibiting atmosphere of the average classroom where what you look like is apparently more important than what you feel or know.

‘Ah,’ the conservative onlooker may say, ‘but it does the young good to learn to keep rules. Life is a matter of keeping rules. What would happen if we all started breaking them?’

Frankly, I think it is a distortion of the virtue of obedience to think it is primarily a matter of keeping rules. The Church has recently relaxed her rules regarding Friday abstinence. The day may come when she no longer commands the faithful under pain of sin to go to Mass every Sunday. And my own belief is that the churches would still be full. Are we so lacking in the love of God that we won’t do penance or join in the offering of the Holy Sacrifice unless a whip is cracked over our heads?

I have seen Catholic adolescents standing just inside the church door, with their narrow pointed shoes and their long-tailed jackets and their hair growing over their ears. They rarely went to Communion, perhaps through a too cut-and-dried notion of the meaning of Christian purity. But they stood there like soldiers, daring themselves not to kneel, members of the Church Militant suffering the sentry duty of the dark days between childhood and manhood, and the sight of them touched my heart, as it should touch the heart of any adult who remembers his youth.

Would they not have been there if the Church had not commanded them to come? I do not think so little of the young. I think that in a time of persecution they might well be martyrs. They are martyrs already, when their necessary effort to break the leading-strings of the nursery involves them in a complex period of adjustment to the Church Herself. Do they not bring joy to the heart of Our Lord? They must; since the adolescent Christ is suffering in them. We are the ones who cause Him sorrow when we shut our eyes and pretend that our spurious peace is the peace He intended us to have.

Rules which cannot be rationally justified should be done away with. This rule regarding the length of hair is no doubt in itself a small matter. Yet no matter is entirely small which increases the gap between the generations and makes it even a trifle more difficult for our adolescents to bring their immense force of energy and idealism to bear on the problems of the Church and the page 577 problems of the contemporary world.

This world is asking them to grow up quickly and develop all their powers. We ask them to remain children when they have long ceased to be any such thing. Between these two demands they are being pulled apart. Only the power of rational choice directed towards God can bring them out of their conflict. Let us not increase their difficulties by pretending to be more stupid and pettifogging than we actually are. I hope to see the Catholic schools, ordinarily conservative, provide a liberating example.

Uniforms are a matter of social and economic justice. A poor man and a rich man should be able to send their sons to school dressed in such a way that no observer would be able to know which was which. But length of hair has no such connotation. It should be left to the discretion of the parents.

1968 (512)