A return to tradition in schools (Labour Pushes Uniforms & House System)

[Khephra]

A return to tradition in schools
By Liz Lightfoot
(Filed: 09/07/2004)


A return to traditional school uniforms, the house system and competitive sport was announced by the Government yesterday.

The back to basics agenda forms part of Labour's five-year plan to reform comprehensives and make them more like sought-after fee-paying schools.

Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, said he expected all schools to have uniforms because they helped to define the ethos and the standards expected.

"They help give pupils pride in their school and make them ambassadors for their school in the community," he said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/09/nskool09.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/09/ixnewstop.html

[Massacure]

1. Why do people care what others wear?

I find the idea of uniforms absurd and a waste of time.

[Khephra]

2. It's all about conformity and hive-mind thinking

[lazarus]

4. not really

Is it any worse to have the peer pressure of wearing the "right clothes" all the time?

My 12 year old wishes her school would go to uniforms, so she didn't have to worry about what to wear, and what others are wearing.

In a way, it enables individuality to come out, because you have to be an individual person, not just someone who wears the "right clothes".

[Khephra]

6. Sorry to disagree with you, Laz

Getting everyone to look the same is one of the first steps to breeding a conformity obeying society. Yeah, there's peer pressure, but studies that I've read in the past have shown that no matter what uniform you put kids in they'll somehow find ways to distinguish cliques from other cliques, so most of the reasons these gov'ts and schools push the idea is moot.

It's all about being the same as everyone else. Assembly-line kids for an assembly-line society.

Remember "The Wall"?

[lazarus]

8. Yeah

But, honestly, I think that uniforms free the kids up.

Besides, how "individualistic" can the kids be? There's already a dress code, sometimes fairly severe.

If you go to your local middle school and watch the kids getting out one afternoon, you'd be surprised. They virtually wear a uniform already. The difference is, while the clothes may all look similar, some of them came from Wal-Mart and K-Mart, and some of them came from whatever the upscale stores are these days.

Uniforms all come from the same place.

I've seen studies that go both ways on this issue; I just know what my daughter wants, and what I've heard from various family members in the education field.

But that's why it's a big tent, right? :D

[Djinn]

9. I went to 2 highschools (both public)

one with a uniform and one without and I can tell you from experience there was FAR more pressure at the one WITH a uniform.

At the non uniform school kids tended to wear whatever was clean and on the floor in the morning, no-one cared after the first couple of months of the first year and there was acceptance of ALL the groups - not saying there weren't popular kids and not so popular kids, but it really wasn't based on who had the expensive shoes and we had punks/goths/surfers/skaters/hippies/sportheads etc (and I grew up in a relatively well off middle class area) at the school where we did have a uniform you got massively picked on if you wore the wrong brand of school shoes (the huge difference being one pair had a slightly more rounded toe) or if your knee high socks weren't at the correct level of "scrunch" then there was the "out of uniform days" where kids would wear hundreds of dollars worth of gear - no-one EVER bothered at the non uniform place.

My mum thought she'd be spending a fortune on clothes when I left the place with a (hideous) uniform - she found it was cheaper, I didn't need two sets of clothing, one for the weekend and one for school, and the clothes I bought (bit of a hippie phase as a teenager) were mostly from op-shops or flea markets rather than stupidly overpriced uniforms.

Then there was the weather appropriateness or lack of it - I shivered my way through two winters wearing a crappy thin cotton skirt, for the first few hours of the day on a wet cold morning we did nothing in class except rub our toes on the threadbare carpet trying to get feeling back into them - got the next school and could wear warm and comfortable clothes.

Soon enough the kids will have to go work in an office or industry and will get used to uniforms soon enough - give them a chance to have some self expression

[SayitAintSo]

7. I couldn't agree with you more...

It's a hard point to get across, but you are exactly right - It free's the kids to focus on the more important aspects of school and takes a lot of pressure of the kids, parents and budgets ...

[Mechatanketra]

5. No policy that tells minors what to do is ever unpopular.

People enjoy wielding power, and if they have it they'll find a way to use it. That's why it corrupts.

Hence, the broader the portion of the populace that is removed as valid objects to exert power on, the more gratuitously it will be used against those that remain, and the more tenaciously the "need" to use it will be described as.

This factor, to some extent, fuels the outrageously illogical demonization of homosexuals, for instance. Why not make one's bigotry blatant? Society doesn't currently penalize one (legally, at least) much for that bigotry, the way it does one's potential prejudices against women or ethnic groups.

Minors are the absolute most vulnerable group to this effect, because they're legally disenfranchised. The only time we admit that a sixteen-year old high school student isn't functionally identical to a helpless and unavoidably dependent infant is if they kill someone. It's a little disturbing to look at some of the similarities between how we treat students and how we used to treat slaves antebellum (for instance, I've seen the same "voting in their interest" argument raised to suggest giving parents extra proxy votes that slave-owners used to justify the 3/5ths-person position).

Ultimately, just about any 'discipline' policy in school comes down to "because they can't vote against us if they don't like it".

[mapster]

3. School uniforms

We lived in Scotland for two years in the '80s and all three kids had to wear uniforms. My husband and I thought it was great but the two boys didn't really like it much at first. My daughter (7 at the time) loved it. They wore white shirts, ties and blazers and my daughter wore a pleated skirt. We visited there two years ago and were shocked that they weren't wearing the uniforms any more. I think most parents here would like it once they realized how much money they could save on school clothes. I'm glad to see that the Brits are trying to go back to it.

[The Flaming Red Head]

10. I hate school uniforms

I hated when they introduced uniforms. They were expensive and hard to find. It was basically just another excuse to put my ADD kid out of class. If he didn’t have his shirt tucked in right, they’d send him to the office, if we got off a bad start and he forgot his belt they’d send him home, if the pants weren‘t quite the right color they‘d call me and make me take time off of work to try and find some that were and they were not helping us buy them either and we didn‘t have any money. It was awful

[rooboy]

11. The uniforms thing is overblown...

I went to a school where EVERYTHING was uniform... shirt, tie, blazer, specially made "adidas" tracksuits, rugby jerseys, you name it. Then for the 'House' in your school you had to buy another range of crap.

By making it compulsory, some schools/stores actually started raising revenue from the damn things. My wife and I can hardly afford to dress our 5 year old for school because we have to buy the prescribed clothes from one of 2 stores. When you have 1500 kids locked into a choice between 2 stores, wouldn't you try to capitalize on the profit potential?

[T_i_B]

12. I would approve of more school uniform

I went to a school with no school uniform, and then I moved down to a part of the country where everyone wears it. I would have preferred uniform myself, if only because it does prepare you for the whole wearing a suit thing when you are older! Plus it is good for those of us who are not interested in fashion.