Some sons do 'ave 'em

Teenage rebels ain't what they used to be. By applying a victim template to the recent fuss about the boys barred from sitting their Junior Cert because their hair was too short, the media undermined both authority and rebellion – the latter because it is impossible to be at once a rebel and a victim. The treatment of the story was a reversal of what might have been expected a generation ago, when, if they had become involved at all, the media would have sided with the Tullamore headmaster.

Mothers of the boys were fielded to present an impression of a Dickensian authority figure imposing arbitrary, outmoded rules in a manner that risked damaging their sons' education. That students might be prevented from sitting exams because they'd had their hair cut with a number-one blade was treated as a grievous travesty of justice, presenting us with the odd spectacle of parents who had sent their children to school to be inculcated in the rule-based culture of society, lambasting the headmaster for doing what they had implicitly required him to do.

The mothers-of-the-shaven were given free rein to present their sons as, simultaneously, adorable rebels and misunderstood paragons of personal spruceness. Commentators railed against the arbitrariness of it all, about how in their own day it was the other way round, with boys getting sent home because their hair was too long.

Rules have always been essential to human society, as have outcasts and rebels. Each serves a purpose but they are not interchangeable. It is silly to criticise rules for being arbitrary: they are frequently so. Their purpose is often to assert that rules, being necessary for the survival of society, must be observed because they are there, or a forfeit paid.

In his fascinating recent book, Us and Them – Understanding Your Tribal Mind, David Berreby conducts a careful study of how societies place imprints on the minds of their members, making connections in the between neurological programmes relating to functions like language, sight and music, and the social requirements of conduct, law and morality.

In one fascinating sequence, he looks at the role in history of what he calls stigma. To preserve necessary concepts of hierarchy and conformity, societies through history have created marks of exclusion to isolate individuals or groups deemed to be outside society's walls.

In medieval Europe, groups like soldiers, criminals and wandering minstrels, wore multicoloured clothes to distinguish them from normal citizens. Fashion has long flirted with these signs of infamy, and youth culture since the 1960s has majored in adapting and reinventing indicators of societal stigma, seeking to assert identity on the basis of the iconography of marginalisation. Fifty years ago, long hair became a fashion issue for men because of its androgynous connotation, previously a big taboo.

Similarly, shaved heads, by their association with convicts, remain a symbol of exclusion. Berreby's fascinating thesis is that authority seeks to prevent the mainstreaming of such imagery not to protect young people from harmful associations but to prevent the iconography of societal rejection from devaluation.

Perhaps the Tullamore headmaster was mindful of this. Perhaps not. But he was certainly operating a programme which has proved essential to the smooth running of society. In other words, he was doing his job.

The primary purpose of collective education is to implant in the minds of the young the same general ideas about the functioning of society. It is open to – indeed incumbent upon – young people to rebel against this, but they must know that there is a price to be paid, and it is hardly the role of adults to be defending youthful rebels against the upholders of rules.

If, in our day, we had been subject to the indignity of our mothers appearing on the News At One to defend our "right" to wear our hair long, we would have been straight down to the barber.