Uniform Cure
Gangs in schools. Students pressured to buy cool clothes. Students divided by social barriers.
School uniforms can cure all these ills and more.
The pro-uniform faction makes these claims. The anti-uniform people – including me – respectfully disagree.
Okay, I'm not respectful. I don't have kids, but I wore uniforms for twelve lousy years, from first grade through senior year in high school. I've heard all the pro-uniform arguments. I'd like to give them a good kick in their navy pleated twill pants. Here are a few:
(1) Uniforms make students equal. Rich kids dress the same as the poor ones.
Wrong. Uniforms are expensive. A standard teen girl's uniform of navy cardigan, navy pleated skirt, white blouse, knee socks and shoes costs more than a hundred dollars today.
The rich teen's family will buy her five white shirts, and three to five navy skirts and two or three cardigans.
The poor teen will get one uniform, possibly a hand-me-down from an older sister. Or Mom bought it secondhand. The poor teen will have two or three blouses, if she's lucky. Her parents – or the girl – will have to wash those blouses. If not, the poor kid goes to school with spaghetti sauce on her shirt. The rich kid will have a fresh blouse and ironed skirt each day.
By the end of the week, the poor teen's skirt needs ironing. By the end of the school year, the seat is shiny.
(2) Not all kids are equally neat.
Put two kids in the same uniform – rich or poor – and within an hour, the natural slob will have his shirt tail hanging out. Miss Piggy will have half her hem hanging lose. She won't notice, since she wasn't born with fashion radar. Buttons pop off the shirts of young slobs and their socks slide into shoes.
Other children always stay neat. At the end of the day, their blouses are unwrinkled. These children can eat sloppy joes and not get a drop of sauce on their uniforms. Cherry pie never falls off their fork and their milk never spills.
(3) Uniforms fight the peer pressure to buy trendy clothes.
Dream on. The cool kids know how to stand out, even in uniforms. They'll wear trendy watches or the latest hairstyles. They get better haircuts. Their moms don't trim their bangs at home.
In my school, the cool kids had genuine Bass Weejuns. The rest of us wore cheap knockoffs. Our mothers thought those shoes looked the same. But we could tell. Real Weejuns said "Bass" on the sole. Prop your feet up on a desk and everyone at school knew.
(4) Uniforms encourage discipline.President Clinton came up with that gem. My Catholic school was orderly, thanks to some terrifying nuns. They whacked kids with rulers. One, who used to work for the CIA, was adept at enforcing discipline by sticking her fingers under a kid's shoulder blade and pulling up. That hurt, but left no marks.
The boys got the most discipline. Few parents would tolerate that treatment today.
(5) Uniforms prevent gangs from forming on campus.
This one makes me giggle. No, we didn't have gangs at my Catholic high school. But gangs already wear uniforms. Even with a school uniform, they can indicate their gang allegiance by the right color ribbon, wrist band, shoe strings, tattoo or hand signal. That's if they're still in school.
Let's not forget the scariest gang of all – the Hitler Youth. They were taught in school that the German "race" was superior and Jewish people were inferior, lazy and evil. The Hitler Youth's extra-curricular activities included beating up Jewish people and wrecking their businesses.
But, golly, they looked sharp in their uniforms.
