High-school and university students unhappy with school dress codes restricting hairstyles say that they will hold campus referendums on whether the hair codes should exist.
"The rules on hairstyles have severely violated students' human rights," said Lin Po-yi (
"Although today's education policy is aimed at encouraging students to develop their own personalities and to be themselves, the schools' hair codes actually reverse that aim," said Lin, a law student at National Taiwan University.
restrictions
Although the Ministry of Education lifted is rules governing hairstyles in 1986, many schools maintain restrictions on the way students may wear their hair and how they dress, Lin said.
In most senior-high schools, girls are not allowed to perm or dye their hair and those with long hair must wear their hair in ponytails. Boys cannot have hair longer than the bottom of their ears and they cannot have bangs that cover their eyebrows.
"Some private schools even ask boys to maintain a uniform crew cut," Lin said.
Schools usually hold hairstyle checks once a month and students whose hairstyles do not pass muster are given demerits, Lin said.
"Students who have more creative hairstyles are often labeled as bad students. I think that's a teachers' prejudice," said Lai Chien-huan (
Lai is the head of the High School Students' Educational Reform Association.
"I believe no one [with a job] has their hairstyle regulated at their workplace while students' hair is checked. This is a persecution of students," Lai said.
referendum
The association is advocating the holding of a "referendum on students' rights" to promote "campus democracy."
Lin said the potential referendum issues, such as the dress codes, pre-graduation trips or class names, won't conflict with teachers' professional duties.
Lin said that students from six senior high schools have expressed their willingness to participate in referendums.
"We want to express our own voices by vote just as we vote on school representatives," said Cheng Yang (鄭揚), a 19-year old microbiology student at Soochow University and a member of the association.
Legal effect
"Although we know the referendum won't have any legal effect since we are not eligible voters, at least adults will hear our voices," Cheng said.
Wu Le-feng (吳麗芬), executive director of the Humanistic Education Foundation, said the foundation is conducting a survey about how the hair dresscodes are implemented nationwide and will announce the result within a few days.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching