The first weeks of school are now behind the Class of 2028. Little people – the phrase is deliberate – have had their first taste of compulsory national education.

The adults around them have to be aware of the great responsibility they have to make sure that these little people do not just succeed in the system itself – passing tests, advancing through the many years and grades ahead – but also succeed in life more generally with the support of the system.

The basic education system is meant to provide those subjected to it with skills to cope with the challenges of life in this place, and this time, both locally and globally. We expect the concepts of universal dignity and full humanity to be instilled as core values in the little people in our schools. We do this to ensure that we have the kind of big people that will make up a society that respects human values. Our recent history has taught us why this is essential. The flaws in our present remind us of what happens when you don’t.

But no syllabus or curriculum, however well-intentioned and complete, can ever be enough to do this. We also, as teachers and parents, as members of the communities in which these schools are, have a role to play in affirming the values of mutual human respect and dignity. As the country debates issues of racism and misogyny, femicide and homophobia, we must remember that our relationship to children must also be infused with the values enshrined in the Constitution.

Earlier this week, after his first day of school, a friend’s son was sent home with a note from the teacher with the instruction that the boy’s hair must be cut, “ASAP”, having also told him his hair length was inappropriate. At first this would seem innocuous, a banal matter of discipline. But the ideas and beliefs which inform that note, and the ideas about the world of the person who sent it, and the school rules which are invoked to support such practices, may need to be rethought.

Many school rules are invoked as if they were written on tablets brought down from Mount Sinai. But of course they are documents written by human beings in specific historical moments and with the purpose of investing in particular values. In South Africa, even today, many school rules date back to a world structured by a crime against humanity, apartheid, and a violation of the deepest kind, colonialism.

School rules ideally structure an environment that ensure the physical safety and emotional security of all pupils. The rules are meant to engender an environment that optimises the conditions for young people to learn and develop into well-balanced adults. Unfortunately, many of the rules are about policing bodies and thoughts, rather than enhancing the chances of developing critical literacy and acquiring the skills for later self-actualisation.

Hair length policed along the lines of old gender norms (girls may have long hair, boys must have short hair) seems educationally short-sighted in a world that defies such simple categorisation of people. Unless a child’s hair interferes with its learning, it really is the business of its parents how to style it. What will such schools do with Rastafarian children? How will they cope with children who do not fit into the neat but violating divisions of masculinity and femininity? Or is there an imagined ghetto elsewhere for those who do not conform to old categories?

When standards used to police children’s bodies in school are critiqued, those who defend them often invoke ‘neatness’, ‘decency’, and other such terms steeped in colonial missionary ideas about morality. Whether it is about how hair is styled (off the forehead, tied back to ensure an open visage indicative of honesty and reliability, like a debased version of the strictures of femininity critiqued in Victorian novels), or notions of conduct steeped in colonial understandings (little girls must be like ladies, little boys like gentlemen, as if the Empire has not died, and as if those concepts were not corrupted by raced and racist notions of what constitutes the fully human condition), we may need to rethink the values that inform our policing habits.

Of course, it is not only children’s bodies which are policed thus. Adults are constantly policing one another in such ways: such values are what beauty contests are founded upon; these ideas shape the understanding of people time-bound ideas about professional dress and acceptable appearance, among other things. At their most baleful, the defences of such practices are that these are just ‘things that work’, the shield of poorly defined notions of ‘the way we have always done things’ become standard of judgement.

Add to this toxic mix of judgement and policing of bodies the complications of sexist, racist, classist and heteronormative ideas of decency, neatness and appearance, and little children are indeed asked to bear an unfair burden in their first weeks of school. Safety and security, physical and emotional, of the individual child, and of the children as a group, ought to be the primary reasons to intervene in the ways in which parents and children choose to self-present. Individual preferences on the part of teachers or people with power should not determine how long a boy’s hair is, or whether a girl wears pants or a dress.

Little people learn lessons quickly and eerily well. If we want to know why so much insult to personal dignity and dehumanising policing of adult bodies blights our society, we may need to think carefully about how our conduct teaches little people how to become the big people who bully them. It’s a survival tactic on their part. It is a political nightmare for all of us. Hair really ought not to be yet another thing to invent categorical rules for children to have to learn.