Ordinary schools, not alternative ones
This article is about mainstream public and private schools in 1967, which were changing more slowly and more unevenly than the colleges and the hippie “free schools” covered elsewhere. Most schools were still organised around fixed rules, a teacher at the front of the room and a clear line between what students could and could not do. Pressure on those arrangements came from several directions: new youth fashions, the civil rights movement, the war, and a growing criticism of how schools treated children.
Hair, hemlines and dress codes
The most visible conflicts concerned appearance. Many schools had written rules about hair length for boys and skirt length for girls, and in some places jeans were banned. As longer hair spread among teenage boys, influenced first by British Invasion bands and later by the hippie look, principals sent students home, suspended them or refused to let them graduate until they had a haircut.
Disputes sometimes went to court, and the decisions that followed varied by region and judge, with no single national answer. For students, the rules were an issue of personal freedom. For school officials, they were about discipline, safety and a belief that sloppy dress led to sloppy behaviour. These arguments feel minor today, but they were taken very seriously at the time, and they carried a wider question: how far could a school control a student’s life outside the classroom?
Student rights
The wider civil rights movement raised the question of rights for young people. Colleges had already seen the Free Speech Movement. High schools were slower, but by the late 1960s students in many places began to publish their own newspapers, sometimes called “underground” papers, and to challenge censorship of the official ones. Administrators often disciplined them, and the legal status of students was unsettled. For older boys the Selective Service draft added urgency, since graduation brought the prospect of induction and the war was a daily topic in many corridors.
At the same time, school desegregation remained a major issue. Federal guidance issued in 1965 and 1966 tied school funding to progress in ending segregation, and many districts, particularly in the South, were slow. Black students and families pushed for access and, increasingly, for changes in curriculum.
The Tinker armbands
The best-known case from this period has a date that can be confusing. In December 1965, in Des Moines, Iowa, several students, including 13-year-old Mary Beth Tinker, her brother John and a friend, Christopher Eckhardt, wore black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. They were suspended. Their families sued, and the case, Tinker v. Des Moines, reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in February 1969.
So the case arose in 1965 and was decided in 1969; in 1967 it was working its way through the lower courts. The Supreme Court held, by a vote of 7 to 2, that the students’ silent protest was protected by the First Amendment because it did not substantially disrupt school activities. The majority opinion said that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” The decision became a foundation of student speech law, though later cases narrowed it.
Open classrooms and school reform
Alongside the arguments over rules, a wave of school reform ideas circulated among educators. The model that drew most attention was the “open classroom,” or informal education, which was associated with British primary schools. Instead of rows of desks and a teacher lecturing, children worked on projects at their own pace in different areas of the room. In England, the Plowden Report on primary education, published in 1967, helped popularise a child-centred approach.
American writers brought these ideas across the Atlantic, and by the late 1960s some districts and individual teachers were trying them out. Writers such as John Holt, whose How Children Fail appeared in 1964, and Jonathan Kozol, whose Death at an Early Age (1967) described his experience teaching in Boston, criticised the way schools treated children, especially poor and Black children. Their books were widely read, and they added to a sense that schools needed deep change.
Reality for most students
It would be a mistake to think these ideas transformed most classrooms in 1967. Open classrooms remained experimental and were found mainly in particular districts or private schools. Most teachers continued to teach in traditional ways, and many parents wanted discipline, not experiment. School boards were also under pressure from taxpayers and from critics who feared that discipline was breaking down.
Teachers themselves were changing too. Younger teachers brought new music and ideas into the classroom, and in some districts teachers began to organise more actively for pay and working conditions. Their relations with administrators were sometimes difficult.
What changed
By the end of the 1960s, courts had begun to treat students as people with some constitutional rights. Dress and hair codes gradually relaxed in many places, though not everywhere. The open classroom enjoyed a period of enthusiasm in the early 1970s, followed by a swing back toward basics. The 1967 school year therefore shows a system under strain, with traditional rules being questioned but still firmly in place.