Original_To:  BITNET%"edpolyan@asuacad"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.edpolyan
Date:         Fri, 11 Dec 1992 10:41:00 MDT
              <EDPOLYAN@ASUACAD.BITNET>
From:         ADAVIS@CUDENVER.BITNET
Subject:      Hats contextualized and deconstructed

It is not true that hats are hats are hats.  Allow me to
share some examples.

In the early 1970s, I taught on the outskirts of Denver in
an area that was undergoing a transition from ranchland to
suburban housing developments.  Nearly all the students were
white.  The newcomers were from the east and midwest; their
parents were coming to work in high tech industry.  The
original rural students, who felt displaced by the arrivals,
wore boots and brimmed caps.  No one else wore hats.  The
new students derided the hat-wearing rural students as
"cowboys."  The administration found the confrontations
unsettling, and successfully outlawed hats.

At Littleton High School south of Denver, a nearly all-white
school where I am currently doing research, you can reliably
identify the level of a math class by the percentage of boys
wearing brimmed caps.  In the "basic skills" class, more
than 60% of the boys wear hats every day.  In honors
geometry, fewer than 25% wear hats.  However, the hats in
themselves are not defining symbols -- top students will
occasionally wear hats.  No official notice is given them,
and there are no rules about them.  They are not an issue,
and many students do not consciously associate them as
symbolizing membership in some group.

In Denver's urban high schools, hats are more of an issue
because they are more explicitly symbolic of group
membership, and the groups don't like each other.  Black
kids wearing blue hats will occasionally shoot a black kid
walking home wearing a red hat.  Latino kids wear different
hats altogether.  Here, as in most of Southern California,
banning hats involves issues far more charged than questions
of etiquette and respect for adults.

I find that the constitutional issues of free speech
interest me less in these matters than the questions of how
and when educators should intervene to try to shape the
social structure and norms of students.  In the 1950s and
early 1960s, adults hovered around telling students what
they could and could not wear, expelled them for smoking,
demanded that they get haircuts, kept them after school for
having shirttails pulled out.  The flip side of those
constraints on expression included a rich variety of adult-
sponsored activites.  There was a sock hop in the gymnasium
every Friday afternoon, neighborhood athletic leagues, and,
in the suburbs and rural areas, scouting, 4-H, church
groups, hiking clubs, hobby clubs, and school clubs.  In
short, there were dozens of opportunities for social
interaction with other kids organized and chaperoned by
adults.

My observation is that the availability of such activities
and student participation in them have waned, for all sorts
of reasons.  But in the absence of adult leadership, it is
easy for students to form exclusive associations based on
race, class, and neighborhood and to fail to develop social
skills that build inclusiveness and rapport.  We can ban
their hats, but the need to do so probably reflects our
failure to involve them in positive social interactions when
they were five years younger.

Alan Davis
University of Colorado at Denver
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