School Uniforms Should Be Banned
Hello everyone! Today, I was inspired to write this piece on school uniforms. I watch a lot of YouTube, and MatPat is one of my favorites. He put out an episode of “Style Theory” about school uniforms and whether the arguments for school uniforms make sense. According to his research, they don’t.
So, I decided to think back to my time as a private school student and think about whether the school uniforms really helped me further my education or fit in better with other students.
I am the youngest child in my family, so I got all of the hand-me-downs from my older sister, even though we have very different body types. I was always taller than her, so I constantly got in trouble for having too short of a skirt. When I got to high school, my mother insisted on buying me longer skirts even though they didn’t fit properly around my waist. I used a safety pin every day my freshman year to keep my skirt from falling. Other girls, who were of similar height and size to me, seemed to have no problem finding skirts that were long enough and fit their waists.
Meanwhile, I still wore my sister’s hand-me-down shirts with the old school logo on it, even after the school logo was updated. I already had trouble fitting in (for reasons still unknown to me), and the school uniforms actually set me apart from the rest of my classmates, which is the opposite of what uniforms are meant to do.
One of the main arguments for having students wear a uniform is so students are not set apart from one another. This is supposed to even out the playing field financially and to prevent students from getting bullied based on what they wear. However, there are many other reasons why bullying happens in schools because there are so many other reasons kids are different from one another besides what they wear. Financial and social differences between students are not kept in check by uniforms, and other factors of differentiation between students are not kept in check at all, so bullying happens no matter what.
In high school, I was the smart, nerdy girl who listened to Panic! At The Disco and Avril Lavigne. I didn’t party or drink, and I definitely didn’t have a date to prom. I had braces my freshman year and I was a theater kid. The list of reasons why I stood out goes on, and school uniforms had nothing to do with any of these things.
The financial argument for school uniforms is unstable at best. Many different stores provide school uniform pieces of different quality and cost, so students can still be financially set apart from one another. This polo shirt from Amazon costs $17, while this polo from Land’s End can cost up to $43. It is recommended that school children have six school outfits, one for each day of the week and an extra outfit as a backup according to MatPat.
This is already quite costly no matter where you shop, but a student would still need bottoms (slacks or a skirt), socks, shoes, sweaters, and maybe even blazers. These all need to be school-approved, which limits parents even more when buying uniforms for their child. Plus, kids still need regular clothes to wear since very few children want to wear their uniforms outside of school.
Lastly, I want to say there is no easy fix to ending bullying. Uniforms or not, people are different from one another, and other aspects of children’s lives must be monitored if schools truly do not want children set apart from one another. The only place where wearing the same thing as everyone else is beneficial is a monastery, where everyone there agrees that they should not be set apart from one another and can instead focus on prayer. School children are not monks–they do not agree to wear uniforms so they can focus on school, school administrations do that. Kids, on the other hand, want nothing more than to be accepted by others, and one way to ensure you fit in is to find how others stand out. Maybe schools should help children deal with their insecurities about making friends instead of trying to assimilate them with uniforms and ignoring the real issues.