25 Dumb Rules People Say They Were Forced To Follow At School

Needing to wait 10 minutes before and after classes have started to use the restroom.

My adolescent body with developing Crohn’s Disease did NOT take kindly to this rule and got into fights with the bathroom monitor often (someone who would make sure nobody was in the bathroom for too long doing drugs, having sex, and other things of the sort).

Thankfully the Principal had a heart of gold and gave me a special pass to use his personal private bathroom which was so nice and clean. In a high school of 5000 teenagers, being able to poop in peace at the rate you go with Crohn’s Disease made my life somewhat less sh*tty (pun intended).

No gloves, because only gang members wear gloves.

It’s freezing cold and your gloves are bright pink? Take them off before someone thinks you’re a member of the notorious pink gloves gang.

We could not touch each other. All physical contact was banned.

There was one teacher that claimed if it wasn’t for this rule, we would all be running around raping each other. Ah, yes, truly the time of my life.

In high school, they tried to implement a rule that guys weren’t allowed to wear pink that was definitely targeted at a guy who was “one of the freaky people” who would wear a pink hello kitty shirt to school. It didn’t work, though, because a large portion of the guys came in the next day wearing pink (including a lot of the football players, which shocked me a little) and the decision was overturned before the day was over.

In grade school. We weren’t allowed to fight back. That was the actual rule. A kid pinned me down with the help of his friends and started going at it. It was winter and he was wearing his big puffy gloves so it wasn’t too bad, but I kicked him off of me and I got in an equal amount of trouble as him. A different kid a few years younger got suspended for a similar instance that same year.

When I pressed them as to what I was supposed to do, apparently I was supposed to “use my words”. Yes because the most effective tool to stop someone beating the s**t out of you is to ask them nicely to stop. I loved that school, with amazing teachers and support staff, but f**k the administration was terrible.

If you were absent too many days out of the year you got a 2-day suspension. Nothing like kicking kids out of school for not being in school.

Couldn’t wear flip-flops because they were considered a weapon but you could wear stiletto heels…

My kindergarten had no doors on the toilet cubicles, but huge mirrors on the opposite wall. We all had to go at the one time. *everyone could see what you were doing. I have lifelong anxiety from this*

In middle school, if we said sorry we got an in-school suspension. The teachers claimed that apologizing is a form of lying and that lying is bad.

Edit: We also weren’t allowed to have water bottles or to a water fountain. The only time we got a chance to drink was during our lunch. We could also only to go the bathroom once a semester, or we would have in-school suspension.

Clear or mesh backpacks only. This was from 1st grade through high school in the late 90s to early 2000s.

We also had to wear a safety vest as our bathroom pass in high school. It was such a joke that the first year the rule was introduced, our yearbooks were a giant safety vest on the outside. Honestly, the thought of a shared unisex safety vest for bathroom visits still grosses me out as I know those things were never washed properly.

Edit: This was before Columbine happened.

At an all-girls high school: No ankle socks because ankles can attract boys and make them have sex with you.

Ankles lead to legs. And legs lead to…. up there…. and we ALL know what’s in that area.

(which also, according to the school was rape on the girl’s part because you were making the boy want to have sex with you, and boys, as you know, cannot resist so….)

In high school we had what they called “lock-out”. If you were 1 second late for class the teachers would lock the doors and you were supposed to go to the cafeteria to get a detention for being late. Instead of getting a detention I would just leave school and skip the whole day and not get in any trouble. All because I was a few seconds late for class. Pretty dumb.

No Simpsons anything. This was when it premiered, and there was this national scare that Bart was a bad influence. There were to popular Bart shirts that were banned, one that said “I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” and another that said “Bart Simpson, underachiever and proud of it”

This eventually evolved into banning all Simpsons shirts, school supplies, stickers, etc. after some of the teachers started watching the show.

I wore the skull misfits shirt and they called me to the dean’s office and told me to turn it inside out. They said it was because it represented death.

I said, “so it represents something that inevitably happens to every person, so I’m not allowed to wear it?” Then walked out. Never caught any flak for it, was pretty proud of my punk 16-year-old rebellious self.

No water bottles because a few girls 4 years ago snuck vodka into the bathroom.

In primary school, we weren’t allowed to use erasers. We were never told why.

Well 3 of them.

No mechanical pencils or any pens that click. Teachers found that s**t annoying.

No peeing outside the toilet or urinal. Common decency but if you were caught, you would get a call from your parents. The rule isn’t stupid, it’s actually really good, but the people who it’s targeted at are.

Zero tolerance policy. It’s in nearly every school. I haven’t had any encounters but it does strike people hard. Imagine getting beat up…. and getting punished for beating up because you happened to be involved even though you did nothing. It’s a d**k of a rule.

My middle school banned hugs. At least, they banned front hugs–the rule was against “chest to chest” contact, regardless of context or gender. No chest bumps after a game. Several girls got in trouble for hugging their female friends goodbye after school. It was a strange place.

Edit: To clarify, this was a public school in a suburban area in a liberal part of the country (US). I don’t remember whether there was a ban against hugs from behind–I’ll try to ask some old classmates when I get home and update if any of them remember.

The boys weren’t allowed to wear shorts at my middle school, but the girls could wear ‘culottes’ (basically shorts with a fancy name). One day about a hundred boys came to school wearing culottes. The Man had it stuck to him hard that day

We weren’t allowed to wear shirts with pictures on them. That includes embroidered logos like you might see from Nike, Champion, or Polo shirts. Kids were wearing those shirts that had Bugs Bunny and Taz dressed up as Kris Kross and some parent or teacher thought they looked like gangsters. So the shirts were dubbed gang paraphernalia and the school wanted them banned but didn’t know how to just ban those without some kid feeling targeted so they banned all shirts with pictures. We’d have free dress day about every two weeks (which devolved into whenever they felt like it) where you could wear a picture shirt, except for those dubbed “gang paraphernalia” (? why they didn’t do that to begin with, over Kris Kross Bugs Bunny of all things I don’t know). If you wore something with a logo on it you had to either cover it with masking tape or buy special labels from the school to cover it.

Yay for insane Christian private schools.

My middle school had a rule; if you were sent to the office for misbehavior, you remained in the office for the rest of the day.

Knowing this, my first-period teacher found every excuse to send me to the office. I missed all of my lessons and nearly failed 7th grade.

We couldn’t wear winter clothing in class (coats, gloves, hats). Even with the heat on, it got cold in the winter inside the school so we just had to freeze. They said it was because winter clothing were gang symbols. This was a farm town in Wisconsin.

Non-American here.

We have to pay a fine when we don’t speak English in school.

In every class, the class leader used to note down student names who ever speak their native language other than English. This rule went on for 2 years and then they finally removed it.

In elementary school, we couldn’t kick a ball at recess because the school was afraid we would kick the balls to the top of the building.

In middle school, had a stupid-as-all-hell “one-way hallway system”, where students could only walk in the halls in one direction. Made me late twice actually since my class was the first one behind the exit door, but forced to go in the entrance door. Was enforced even when halls were empty. One stick-in-the-mud teacher threatened to write me up if I questioned the rule.