School officials said in a letter that the school is eliminating all-black clothing because it is “associated with depression and mental health issues."

A Texas middle school is banning students from wearing all-black clothing because school officials say it’s associated with mental health issues.

Students at Charles Middle School in El Paso, Texas, headed back to school Monday, days after a letter from Principal Nick DeSantis outlined the school’s new dress code policy. The letter says the school is eliminating all-black clothing because it is “associated with depression and mental health issues and/or criminality.”

Norma De La Rosa, the president of El Paso Teachers Association, explained in more detail why the policy is in place and what clothing is allowed. She says teachers see a sudden change in students going from dressing with color to all black when they are depressed or stressed.

…

Many parents and community members disagree with the policy, commenting online that clothing color doesn’t define a person’s mental state.

“The color of clothing has nothing to do with your ability to do anything or feel any emotion,” Alex Lucero said.

“Making students wear a different color isn’t going to magically make them a completely different person,” Alexis Contreras said.

  • Elise@beehaw.org
    2·
    3 months ago

    Think about this for a second:

    Take all the stupid shit you’ve done and said in your life. For argument’s sake let’s say you are absolutely average in terms of stupidity. That means 50% of people are more stupid than you.

    And now imagine that again, but with your capacity for noticing your own stupidity. Obviously there’s stuff you’ve missed. 50% of people will have a lower capacity to notice their own stupidity.

    I think it’s safe to say that the distribution is a bell curve. That means 50% of people are sort of average. But 25% will be significantly below that and 10% of the total will be severely stupid.

    Safe to say stupidity is a powerful force in this world.

    Then we are not talking even yet about mental disorders. Iirc schizophrenia has an occurrence of roughly 2%, and so does psychopathy. Of course not all people with shizo are unable to manage it, and not all psychos are evil. But it’s still a lot of people!

    • dactylotheca@suppo.fiEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      And before anyone barges in saying “that’s not how averages work”, first of all you mean the, uh, mean – both the mean and the median are averages.

      Second, intelligence probably follows a distribution that’s reasonably close to Gaussian (at least on a smaller scale) just like more or less literally all biological variables do. And I don’t mean IQ, but the general idea that cognitive performance – however the hell you define it – is going to vary from person to person and it’s going to approximately follow a Gaussian curve. The upshot of this is that the median is probably very close to the mean.

      • Elise@beehaw.org
        2·
        3 months ago

        Thanks for expanding on that. Can you say something about the difference between a bell curve and a gaussian curve?

        • dactylotheca@suppo.fiEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          Oh there’s no difference, “bell curve” is just a more colloquial term for a normal distribution. “Normal distribution”, “Gaussian distribution / curve” and “bell curve” all mean the same thing.

          Wouldn’t be math if there wasn’t 736 different names for the same thing 😆

          • Elise@beehaw.org
            2·
            3 months ago

            Oh sorry, I quick read over the first sentence and missed it. Long day yesterday!