I'm warming to idea of puffer jackets

MUCH has been made this week of the decision by a Motueka school to stand firm on its ban on puffer jackets in spite of a petition, and insist on regulation uniform.

I get where the school is coming from. I remember being 16 and in a bid to exercise my new-found teenage lust for independence I was constantly wearing down my teachers by bending the rules to see if they would break (both teachers and rules).

A student at a very traditional private all-girls school, I picked small but significant battles such as wearing a non-regulation ribbon colour around my ponytail and swapping the scratchy woollen winter stockings for thigh-high socks.

I tried to get away with having my hem half an inch higher than the required length, which was to be touching the floor when you were kneeling (which we did a lot given each day started with a short chapel service).

At one point I really pushed out the boat by attempting to get away with two studs in my ear instead of one, and dying my hair black. This act of defiance earned me a suspension until I argued successfully I was not in breach of the "hair should look natural" rule since most of the world's population had naturally black hair.

In hindsight looking back, I regret my high-handed flagrant breaches of the rules on appearance.

Not because rules shouldn't be challenged, but because only the ones that matter should be.

Following the same logic I don't support parents who fight court battles so their sons can have long flowing locks, nor ride luggage carousels on a whim. These are battles for the sake of battles, just like my decision to wear a yellow ribbon in my hair.

But to campaign to be warm in a part of the country where temperatures at the time you walk to school sit at zero most days is a fight worthy of support. To insist on sticking to the rules just because they are the rules is, in this particular instance, fatuous.

Perhaps it is a hangover from our colonial roots but New Zealand schools seem to have always approached uniforms in winter as though they were some sort of mechanism for tough love rather than a practical alternative to nakedness.

For generations, boys' chicken legs covered in goose bumps have protruded from shorts year-round until they were older and had suffered some misguided "manly" right of passage to wear trousers and be warm. Yesterday I read on Facebook of a friend whose daughter was sent off the (nearly icy) court during a netball game recently because he insisted she wear a thermal under her winter sports uniform.

Although we live in a land where there are six sheep for every person, it is not as affordable as it once was for parents to dress their children in warm layers of woolly undergarments topped with the standard-issue V-neck woollen jumper. A black puffer jacket bought at the 50 per cent-off spring sale is a warm and affordable fashion fix.

If the Government can be hauled over the coals for not making state houses warmer (and thus safer) for our children when it's freezing outside, how come schools can get away with insisting kids leave their warmest clothing at home?

Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.