According to a BBC report today, schools in Britain are having their students switch from knotted ties to clip-ons.
The Schoolwear Association says 10 schools a week in the UK are switching, because of fears of ties getting caught in equipment or strangling pupils...The emergence of clip-on ties is part of a growing sensitivity towards health and safety, says the association, along with modifications such as high-visibility trimming on scarves.
Clip-on ties take away the risk of pupils having accidents with their knotted ties.
Schools have raised concerns about ties catching fire in science lessons, getting trapped in technology equipment or ties getting caught when pupils were running.
Clip-on ties also allow schools to create a more standardised appearance, says the association, stopping pupils from being more creative in how they wear their ties.
Last year the Daily Mail covered the same topic, but the emphasis was more on uniformity than on health issues (photo above):
TYWKIWDBI's take - this is 100% about enforcing uniformity and suppressing individual expression. There may be occasional health and safety issues among tens of thousands of tie wearers, but that's just a public spin by the institutions.Tied as short as possible, with a defiantly large knot, most pupils seem to wear their tie as a badge of rebellion rather than respectability.
But the 'chavvy' knot, popularised by comedienne Catherine Tate's unruly schoolgirl character Lauren Cooper, has been banned at one school, which has made clip-on ties compulsory instead.
Christopher Stone, head teacher of Arthur Terry school in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, has claimed that behaviour and attendance has improved since the ban.
'It's a mess when you walk around town and you see children with their buttons undone and their ties all over the place,' Mr Stone, 50, said... 'The clip-on versions will help to take away that negative interaction between the teacher and the pupil.'
Perhaps the change is necessary; perhaps it's like the need to ban gang symbols. In any case, this seems an appropriate time to embed the Pink Floyd classic...
To be honest, I'm a little put off by the depiction of chaos and anarchy, but the theme is still a vibrant and appealing one.
The resonating verse "We don't need no education" seems to be self-mocking, but it can also be viewed as saying "we don't need (the lack of) education" in the sense that what they are learning in school is not useful. Excellent discussion of the lyrics here.
While some apply the song's biting lyrics to specific kinds of schooling, others use it as a rallying cry against any government mandated form of education. Largely as a result of this latter utilization, many countries around the world have banned the song from being played on their radio stations, a few even going so far as to place a national ban on both the album and Pink Floyd. However, counter to these extremist views of total educational anarchy, the song was written as an attack against a specific type of learning...Update: Originally posted in May, reblogged now because the BBC has a new report on this event, with photographs to show "When school ties go bad" -
Ironically, despite being a song about individuality, the lyrics are full of apparent conformity. Gone is any first person singular pronoun... Roger Waters wanted to show how conformity is ever-present, even when we're little, and even when we are rebelling...
- which also has an explanation of the phenomenon known as "peanutting" and how to counteract it. The comment thread at the article is also interesting.