Uniformity
I want to come back to school uniforms because of Ailbhe’s comment on my piece about the school orchestra. She said that because she didn’t have access to trendy clothes like the other children, the uniforms were about the only thing the schools she went to got right.
At least these days the uniforms can often be bought cheaply from Tesco’s, rather than, when I was at school, very expensively from Rawcliffe’s. In my first year at secondary school was a girl from a poor family who couldn’t afford the proper uniform and her cheap and nasty version of it brought scorn on her head from staff and pupils alike, and that appalled me then, and still does.
But, even if the uniform is cheap - and why are clothes from supermarkets cheap? Where are they made? Who makes them, and what do those who make them get paid? I’m not even going to go there in this piece, I’m just pointing out that things are never straightforward – then I still think there’s something sad about dressing a whole schoolfull of children identically.
Uniform is supposed to stop school turning into a fashion parade – but it often doesn’t work. I remember when I was teaching in a secondary school in the early eighties, one lad complained that he had lost his trainers.
“Go and look in lost property, then,” I said – my usual response to such exciting matters.
“They won’t be there, Miss. Someone’s nicked them because they cost £50.”
“If they cost £50,” I replied – and remember this was in about 1983! – “then why on earth did you bring them to school?”
The shoes, the schoolbag, the haircut – all ways to circumnavigate the sameness of school uniform. Sometimes to express personality – great! Sometimes to show how rich and trendy you are - - - and that’s what infuriates me.
I suppose my quarrel is with some parents who seem very willing to respond to “pester power” and buy their children designer gear and then let them wear it to school. Yes, I know it can be hard to resist. And I know that I’m fortunate in that my daughter’s attitude has always been “designer gear – pah!” But if every parent in the country wasn’t interested in designer gear and didn’t let their children have it, far less wear it to school, and insisted that they wore whatever they liked to school as long as it was suitable for going to school in and wasn’t too expensive - THEN THERE WOULD BE NO NEED FOR SCHOOL UNIFORMS!
Then children of all ages could express their personality through their clothes, and this would be a Good Thing.
I know that uniforms take the “what shall I wear today?” decision out of choosing clothes. And I’m certainly taking Ailbhe’s argument seriously. But many other countries don’t have our obsession with school uniform, and they seem to cope.
To come back to my original point – I don’t like to see children dressed all the same (or adults, come to that – perhaps you guessed I’m not a big fan of formal suits). All I need is a fundamental change in society’s values, and then they won’t have to be.
At least these days the uniforms can often be bought cheaply from Tesco’s, rather than, when I was at school, very expensively from Rawcliffe’s. In my first year at secondary school was a girl from a poor family who couldn’t afford the proper uniform and her cheap and nasty version of it brought scorn on her head from staff and pupils alike, and that appalled me then, and still does.
But, even if the uniform is cheap - and why are clothes from supermarkets cheap? Where are they made? Who makes them, and what do those who make them get paid? I’m not even going to go there in this piece, I’m just pointing out that things are never straightforward – then I still think there’s something sad about dressing a whole schoolfull of children identically.
Uniform is supposed to stop school turning into a fashion parade – but it often doesn’t work. I remember when I was teaching in a secondary school in the early eighties, one lad complained that he had lost his trainers.
“Go and look in lost property, then,” I said – my usual response to such exciting matters.
“They won’t be there, Miss. Someone’s nicked them because they cost £50.”
“If they cost £50,” I replied – and remember this was in about 1983! – “then why on earth did you bring them to school?”
The shoes, the schoolbag, the haircut – all ways to circumnavigate the sameness of school uniform. Sometimes to express personality – great! Sometimes to show how rich and trendy you are - - - and that’s what infuriates me.
I suppose my quarrel is with some parents who seem very willing to respond to “pester power” and buy their children designer gear and then let them wear it to school. Yes, I know it can be hard to resist. And I know that I’m fortunate in that my daughter’s attitude has always been “designer gear – pah!” But if every parent in the country wasn’t interested in designer gear and didn’t let their children have it, far less wear it to school, and insisted that they wore whatever they liked to school as long as it was suitable for going to school in and wasn’t too expensive - THEN THERE WOULD BE NO NEED FOR SCHOOL UNIFORMS!
Then children of all ages could express their personality through their clothes, and this would be a Good Thing.
I know that uniforms take the “what shall I wear today?” decision out of choosing clothes. And I’m certainly taking Ailbhe’s argument seriously. But many other countries don’t have our obsession with school uniform, and they seem to cope.
To come back to my original point – I don’t like to see children dressed all the same (or adults, come to that – perhaps you guessed I’m not a big fan of formal suits). All I need is a fundamental change in society’s values, and then they won’t have to be.
posted by Daphne at 6:39 pm
1 Comments:
"As someone who never had access to the trendy clothes other people had, I have always been grateful for school uniforms, which were compulsory in both middle-class suburban schools I went to. It's about the only thing they got right."
I perhaps ought to have added that in the other schools I went to, where we were in the same income bracket as everyone else, there were no uniforms and we were never mocked for our clothes.
In the middle-class schools, uniforms (particularly at secondary level) were so phenomenally expensive that everyone wore a kilt down to their ankles in first year and up around mid-thigh in sixth year, with a suspiciously thin patch at the back from years os sitting. And many, many people sold uniforms on and wore second-hand ones. Getting one's uniform to look as grungy as humanly possible was *encouraged*. Well, not by staff. That was the point.
I'm right behind that changing the fundamental values of capitalist society thing though. Right behind it. Pushing.
A
(Just remembered - my older sisters, born 1966-69, claim that it was much less peerly vicious in their day than in mine and younger sister, born 1978-81, just in time for Me Generation and massive, massive 1847-like levels of unemployment in Ireland)
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