We all remember those incredibly silly rules that were forced on us in school for no apparent reason. Well, these absolutely take the cake for the dumbest rules enforced by schools.
1. This seems cruel
We had to sign out to go to the bathroom BUT if we signed out over three times a quarter (9 weeks), we would get a grade deduction.
Harryson309
2. Seems a little excessive
If you drove to school you had to park your car at least 1 kilometer away from the campus, apparently so that the school would not be liable in the event that you died in a car crash.
66th_jedi
3. Ban everything!
My elementary school took the safety first rule to mean that anything where someone got hurt became banned. This meant that any popular game inevitably got banned after a few days. After the conventional games like basketball, soccer, tag, etc. got banned we were left with safe games. Then they banned yo-yoing after a kid got hit with one, invisible sword fights, jump ropes. Once they banned all physical activities, things started to be banned for causing emotional harm. TCGs (Magic, Pokemon), slumber party games (Mafia, detective). It became a game in itself to see how quickly you could get something banned. They wondered why kids couldn’t pay attention in class.
CoryjPickens
4. Late Party
At my school if you are even 1 minute late you get an office detention. Every day there are 100-200 people in it…
gokuimhungry
5. $.25 for using a tissue.
WHYYYY! How expensive could these tissue boxes be? How many tissues are being used? So. many. questions…
8bitmisfit
6. Why would you wear that?!
We wore uniforms that were ordered from a magazine provided by the school. If our uniform skirts looked to be “too short” they were measured with a ruler. Thin girls who wore a smaller size had slightly shorter skirts than everyone else, so we were constantly being sent to the principal’s office for wearing the uniforms they required us to wear.
meganovaa
7. OK relax
I wasn’t allowed to wear a yellow raincoat because it “reminded people of Columbine.” It reminded me of Paddington Bear.
pocketmonster921
8. I LOVED THAT IPOD
During middle school, the locker room lockers weren’t allowed to be used because “some students leave food in there”. Surprise, surprise, a lot of people got their stuff stolen and the administration didn’t even care.
The school did nothing about it until a PE teacher got his iPod stolen, THEN they started having people monitor the locker room occasionally, but theft still occurred.
multiplesarcasms31
9. That’s cold
When I was in high school one of my classmates was diagnosed with cancer. As a form of fundraising to help his family, some students/parents organized a t-shirt sale at the school where all the proceeds went to his family. Pretty much everyone ordered one and the day they came in we all put them on over our usual uniform shirts.
Later that day the principal came on the PA to say we all had to take the shirts off because visitors were coming to the school and he didn’t want them to think we had substandard uniform regulations. For a school that preaches “family”, I thought that was completely ridiculous and kind of insulting.
ogtblake
10. We couldn’t say the word ‘cereal.’
Some kid would keep saying it and some dude decked him in the head… Ceriously 🙂
AttonRand1
11. “We don’t need no education”
Around the time Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” came out, students were forbidden from playing “Another Brick In The Wall pt 2” on school grounds. Students got a letter to give to their parents from the School Superintendent. He felt the lyrics, “We don’t need no education” & “Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone” were “revolutionist” & anybody playing the song was considered a “dissident” by the School Superintendent. This is 4th, 5th & 6th graders were talking about here. Parents had a field day, citing all sorts of free speech violations. Superintendent was fired at the end of the school year…
mrd-uyi
12. How is that a reason!?
We could not sit on the ground, the reason for this was that “people would have sex” – because that’s exactly what happens when children sit on the ground.
elinery
13. Nice…
You could only wear short sleeved polos, no long. It lasted a day, since it was around winter.
Minimal logic surrounding this one…
Upboater3
14. So… like you cant see?
The frames on your glasses could only be black otherwise you’d be sent home or have to spend the day without glasses.
adlysn
15. Oh well…
If you were late to school at all, you’d need your parent to sign you into school. And obviously anyone with two working parents would see this as the idea that if you’re even a few seconds late, you have to ditch completely.
moonsugardealer
16. Thug life
We couldn’t wear gang colors or bandanas. This was in a town of 500 people in rural Missouri. Hilariously dumb.
vengefulmuffins
17. We weren’t allowed to bring playing cards of any sort to school because it would look like we were gambling.
Eventually we just started keeping track of bets with tally marks, betting school lunches etc. We worked around it.
66th_jedi
18. Hair gel??
They banned hair gel. What was the point in that? Nobody had crazy mohawks or anything. What did this solve?
Universal-Cereal-Bus
19. So dumb…
You had 2 minutes to get from one class to the next. Sounds good on paper until you realize we had one way halls only and if your next class was on the other side of the school, you were pretty much screwed. If to were late to class, you had to go to detention the entire period.
What made this rule stupid was that you couldn’t take your backpack into class so you had to put it into your locker. So between each class, you had to put your books away and get your other books for the next class, eating up your time to get to the next class.
Eventually the school got rid of the time rule and the backpack rule when they realized how stupid it was.
A_Ron24
20. ONE WAY?
They tried to make halls and stairways one way. It lasted maybe a year. I stopped caring after I realized that the teachers would just disobey it anyway.
Hobbes579
21. All boys had to have short hair.
No hair below the ear lobe. If it is then you had to go to the headmaster to get your head shaved completely. No exceptions, not even religion.
likitung41
22. Harry potter books are banned by the principal.
No one enforces it cause it’s really stupid… Why would you ever discourage a child from reading? That is some evil stuff.
SaturdayNightFuhrer
23. “Zero tolerance.”
Any fight (or schoolyard scuffle) resulted in both parties being suspended regardless of the circumstance. One kid could walk up to another kid and punch him in the face without warning or explanation and both get suspended. Brilliant.
airborngrmp
24. Your total comes out to…
In my school, the rules are that if your phone is out, they take it, and you get it back from the principal at the end of the day. 2nd offense, get it back, along with a day ISS, and 3rd offense is your parents come to the school at the end of the year, pay $50, and then you get your phone back.
That policy didn’t last very long. As it turns out, parents aren’t very excited about paying for something they already own, or having their children’s property confiscated.
Gingerdavi
25. At my school you need to have a signed doctors note to bring a water bottle to school.
You can get suspended for bringing it.
pyriclastic_flow
26. My favourite rule was no running on school grounds, including sports fields.
The rule was removed after students realized that it would be breaking the rules to play any sport above walking pace, hilarity ensued as prefects started handing out detentions at the finishing line in our annual school olympics.
kiwinutsackattack
27. We had a rule in our dining hall where you weren’t allowed to move seats again, after you’d sat down at the first one.
To this day I have no idea why, but it was official, and clearly written down. Not too rigorously enforced mind you.
Eddie_Hitler
28. At my elementary school during lunch time, we had the 5 minutes of silence.
After everyone sat down to eat, the teachers would call 5 minutes of silence and if as much as noisily crunched on a cracker, they sent you to detention. You can imagine how hard this is for 1st through 5th graders.
forexternaluseonly_
29. Thus, a new rule was born
The lunch ladies weren’t required to wear hair nets because they had some sort of spray-on replacement that was supposedly effective at doing the same thing. Eventually, we all got tired of picking hair out of our food, so a group of kids decided to boycott the school lunches by packing ~300 paper bag lunches and handing them out to whoever wanted them. That day, there were only around 10 people who ate the school lunch (and most of them were special needs students who were forced by their “supervisors” to not participate).
So a few hours after lunch, we all get called in to an assembly, where they begin lecturing us about how rude we were to the lunch ladies. Apparently, we’d hurt their feelings, because we didn’t want to eat their food.
Thus, a new rule was born: you aren’t allowed to eat a lunch that someone else brought to the school for you.
xprockox
30. Yeah, they probably did
Back when cell phones weren’t really what they are now. If you got caught with it, the principal would take it for the rest of the SEMESTER. Well sure enough I got my phone confiscated and my mom went in there raising hell. She told them they don’t pay the cell phone bill and that holding it for months was basically theft. They ended up changing the rule after that. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking.
mLw08
31. “If you wore tasteful clothes, this wouldn’t be an issue.”
Our school had a uniform with a shirt as part of it. One year they switched the colour to white shirts (from navy), but because they had a cheap supplier, they were pretty see-through. As a result, every female student’s bra was visible.
Instead of acknowledging their mistake and changing the colour back or just switching to a uniform manufacturer that didn’t use fabric as thin as tissue paper, they implemented a bunch of rules about what colour underwear girls were allowed to wear. It was only for girls, too. A boy with a blue undershirt was fine, but a girl with a blue bra–heavens no! Everyone thought it was stupid, including many parents, but the official line was, “If you wore tasteful clothes, this wouldn’t be an issue.”
Having a rule that forces male teachers to comment on the bras of girls as young as 13 is pretty messed up, IMO. Especially when many of these children didn’t even get to buy their own clothes, but relied on their parents.
DerUrVogel