Thoughts about Uniforms

Having gone to public schools with no uniforms, I enjoy drawing comparisons between the students here and the students I remember back home. The most commonly-cited justifications for school uniforms--that I've heard, anyway--are safety and self-esteem. The less fortunate kids, whose families can't afford brand new clothes each year, don't have anything to worry about here: everybody wears exactly the same clothes at school, all the time. Without any new apparel to show off, there also isn't anything for envious kids to steal or fight over. Furthermore, the case could easily be made that removing the distraction of fashion trends and classism lets the students avoid a big source of stress and anxiety.

Having seen it in action for a year and a half, though, I have my doubts. With respect to theft and fighting, I think what has been labeled as the cause is merely one of the effects, while the cause goes untreated. I doubt very strongly that any of my high schoolers would steal something that belongs to any of the other students. They're far from perfect little angels--there are bullies, jerks, and mean girls--but I just can't picture any of them stealing. There's a whole lot of trust in my community; when they go into a grocery store, students will routinely leave their school bags unattended on the ground outside the front door.

With respect to removing the harmful effects of classism and fashion, I agree that uniforms necessarily remove that problem from the school. Everybody has the same clothes, socks, shoes, and hairstyle, which takes away a lot of things that I remember being used as basis for judgment by everybody else. However, this treats a symptom and not the purported problem: people find ways to distinguish themselves from the group, and similarly find ways to classify and group others. My students can't compare brands of jeans or handbags, but they somehow have no trouble forming cliques just like we did. There are easily recognized groups, and those not in the group simply don't hang out with the group members.

My biggest problem with uniforms is the lack of opportunity for self-expression. This is not as big an issue back home, because no matter how stringent the uniform requirements, all public school students only have to worry about uniforms Monday through Friday, and then only until the mid-afternoon. The students here, however, average going to school six and a half days a week. On normal M-F class days, they average arriving between 7 and 8 in the morning, and go home somewhere between 5 and 7 in the evening. That whole time, of course, they are in their uniform. (Except during P.E., when they all change into the exact same gym uniform.)

I understand the case can be made that the students are being socialized with respect to fashion. It could, I suppose, be effectively argued that forcing the students to wear what most people would agree are mature, conservative, professional-looking outfits makes the students grow accustomed to adhering to a dress code in general, and to accepting such clothing types as normal. Indeed, I appreciate the value of accepting a dress code: every Japanese salaryman wears a suit to work every day for the rest of his life, and minimizing any resentment toward that fact will improve the harmony of the workplace. In addition, I believe uniforms have succeeded in shaping students' perception of normal fashion: in my experience, the majority of Japanese women wear skirts instead of jeans or shorts, no matter how cold it is outside.

However, the benefits of the dress code come at the expense of the students' opportunities for self-expression. Nobody is given the chance to try new things. Guys can't try growing their hair out, girls can't try braids, and nobody gets to try highlights or dyeing. Nobody gets to wear silly shirts, prim and proper polos and khakis, or Chucks to school. No cute socks, no rugged camouflage coats, no crazy eyeshadow. There aren't even summer vacations to cut loose and try a radical new hairstyle.

This wouldn't be a problem if the students invariably wore muted, mature-looking clothing when not in uniform. Were that the case, I would reluctantly accept the success and merit of molding the students' fashion sense. But when I see them out of uniform (most commonly on Sunday afternoons), the boys are wearing things like oversized sweat pants, faded jeans with holes, and t-shirts with broken English written on them. The girls go a lot further, with clothes ranging from denim mini-skirts to nicely fitted jeans to baggy sweatsuits, cute pastel t-shirts to scandalously low-cut tops, and six-inch heels to leather boots to Crocs.

Seeing this, I can only conclude that, far from removing any desire to try unusual and new fashion, the school uniform requirement merely represses that desire. It represses it so much, in fact, that on the rare occasions the students get to express themselves fully, they go wild with it. Their actual fashion choices are, to me, not nearly as important as the variety of those choices and how drastically different they are from their school uniforms.

I'm not suggesting they be allowed to wear microskirts and baggy sweatsuits to school. Nor am I claiming the dress codes I grew up with are perfect. It's just that there's a whole lot of room for compromise between the two extremes of 'strictly regimented school uniforms' and 'wear what you please.'