Back in the 1960s, 16-year-old Frank, an English grammar schoolboy from a poor family living in a council house, worked extra hard on his paper round. He saved enough to buy a Vespa scooter, along with a metallic silver crash helmet.

When Frank proudly turned up at school on his scooter, wearing the flashy protective helmet, he was immediately hauled before the headmaster and expelled for not wearing full school uniform. He lacked his unprotective school cap, bearing the badge and the laughable Latin motto Temere Non Judicandum, (which means Judge Not Rashly).

The irony of that motto, and the principal’s vicious response to a safety-conscious and upwardly-mobile pupil, was not lost on the junior reporter from a local weekly newspaper…

That dinosaur of an ex-army headmaster took precisely the same sort of crazy approach that the elitist control freaks at Scots College, Wellington, took with 18-year-old top-ranking student James. We don’t know his surname, and perhaps that’s just as well.

James wanted to raise money and raise awareness for prostate cancer, during Movember, by growing a sponsored moustache. He has an awareness of the disease, plus sufficient testosterone. Perhaps he has a relative who has suffered from this creeping disease that older males are so reluctant to recognise, and which kills 600 New Zealand men every year.

But the dusty sods who run Scots College were not in the slightest bit interested in James’s innate intelligence, or the fact that he was using it in a thoughtful, enlightened and positive way.

Oh, no. They were only concerned with his outward appearance, as it fits the school rules.

They said: Either James removes the moustache, or he is barred from sitting NCEA exams at the school.

That’s a bit rich, because it’s the NCEA (and not Scots) that runs the exams.

Scots College principal Graeme Yule, who seems to have arrived from a previous century, said James had breached the private school’s appearance guidelines and that he would not be allowed to sit his level three exams there if he turned up unshaven.

Yule said people attending the school know they have signed up for “certain values” and a “unique” type of education. He said James could make arrangements with the Qualifications Authority to sit his exams elsewhere.

This is not a top-class, leading-edge educational establishment.

It is an old-fashioned Presbyterian barracks.

James, having clearly made the best use of his education (despite all odds) by learning how to learn, discovering that curiosity leads to interesting challenges, and taking on an unusually early responsibility to his community, faced the ultimate sanction: rejection from exams that would prove to already-stultified examiners that he is in fact extremely bright.

And all this because of mindless rules that seek uniformity, obedience and slavish adherence to an inexplicable doctrine that might have more to do with military discipline than it has with individualism, let alone education.

The people who run Scots College should be ashamed of themselves.

We can show why educators like some at Scots are failures, by reporting what happened to Frank and to the weekly newspaper reporter who revealed the story and got Frank re-admitted.

Frank committed some low-level vandalism against his school and was punished for it. He left with a few formal qualifications, but became a highly successful “late developer”.

Today, he is a retired millionaire.

The reporter, also condemned as an academic failure by the same school, built a career as a writer and editor, then went into business.

Today, he is a retired millionaire.

John, the school’s sneakiest delinquent, became a detective-sergeant. Terry, the school’s remarkable top athlete, became a hermit environmentalist. Tony, the school’s dumbest of 1965, learned about pipes and became a millionaire plumbing supplier.

So James, don’t let the backward-looking bastards get you down, even if you did shave off the facial hair in the face of authoritarian threats. The teachers very often get it wrong.

Many of your predecessors were victims of an education system that, like today’s, took little account of individualism. We have a feeling that, later on in life, you’ll make a difference to society that the narrow-minded teachers who demanded you shave off your fuzz could never achieve. Thanks for growing it.