BY ROB LEYSHON

IT'S LATE AFTERNOON and I'm in a shopping mall Internet café.

A bunch of kids is fooling around outside a burger joint on the other side of the food hall. They're all young teenagers (none of them more than 14, I'd guess), they're all in school uniform, and they're all a mess.

The boys' ties are either off or yanked loose, or in their hands (though one lad's is wrapped round his head, Rambo-style). Their shirt tails are flapping outside their pants, which hang slack and shapeless over their unlaced shoes.

The girls are even worse. In classic jail-bait manner, they've hiked their skirts up as high as they dare. Socks are rolled down over ankles, blouses are unbuttoned to show whatever cleavage they have, most are wearing some kind of cosmetics.

And your correspondent is compelled to report (merely in the interest of accurate journalism, you understand) that he can spot at least one very conspicuous navel ring.

It's scandalous. It's outrageous. Poor Jeff Broomes would be frothing at the mouth if he could see it.

But he needn't worry.

Because I'm not at Sheraton Centre or Mall Internationale, but 4 000 miles away in the beautiful university city of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

For the past fortnight I've been attending a series of events and exhibitions celebrating the quatercentenary of the birth of the great poet and polemicist John Milton (of Paradise Lost fame), one of Cambridge's most illustrious alumni.

Milton, despite (like Mavis Beckles) having an opinion on everything, never wrote specifically about school uniforms. But the crusty old Puritan did publish a pamphlet in 1644 (currently on display in Christ's College Library) excoriating the shabby standard of education in English schools of the time. His suggested reforms aimed to mould boys (not girls: Eve's daughters didn't matter much to Milton, and could end up as the 17th Century equivalent of barefoot and pregnant for all he cared) into "brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous to all ages".

Having just read (in the online NATION) details of the Barbados Association of Principals of Public Secondary Schools' (BAPPSS) new standardised dress code, I have a strong sense that Jeff Broomes and his colleagues have something similarly exalted in mind for Barbadian school students. The code is clearly informed by the popular conviction that appearance and behaviour are morally connected: in other words, the sloppier the appearance, the slacker the behaviour.

But is this really so? One could just as well argue the obverse.

The most viciously depraved boy at my secondary school in London, for example, was also the most impeccably well dressed (I remember with a shudder his silk shirts, the perfect Windsor knot in his tie). And then there's the Hitler Youth: squeaky-clean little thugs that grew up to become full-grown Nazi psychopaths – in fabulously stylish uniforms.

The BAPPSS code does its best to lay down the law, and I'm particularly impressed by the bizarre precision of its strictures: "Senior girls' skirts MUST be worn at the waist, MUST extend at least two inches or five centimetres below the knee and MUST not be tight."

How exactly is this to be enforced, though? The mind boggles at the thought of Jeff Broomes down on his knees with a ruler in his hand.

The truth is, by dressing outrageously students – whether in Cambridge or Bridgetown, Kabul or Cairo – are merely doing what teenagers the world over have always done: namely, challenge authority and annoy the hell out of their elders.

And for this reason alone, I'm sure that old rebel John Milton would give them a grudging nod of approval.

* Rob Leyshon is a lecturer in English, University of the West Indies, and director, Cave Hill Theatre Workshop.