No.

I always hated it growing up, too. My school didn’t even have a uniform, only a dress code, and I hated that, too.

But my kids go to a school with a uniform, and now I can see the advantages:

• this school subsidizes the uniforms heavily, even to the point of giving them away outright to students in need, so it represents a form of clothing that is affordable for all

• kids can’t fight with parents about what they wear to school, because it’s predetermined

• every kid wears the same thing, which helps smooth out class-indicators: kids don’t get bullied for wearing hand-me-downs or unfashionable clothes because everyone wears the same thing

• makes it very easy to determine who is supposed to be on campus and who is not; similarly, since the school has a big emphasis on outside-the-classroom learning, makes it very easy to identify students out on fieldwork

• saves me money since the uniforms are unisex and my son can wear the hand-me-downs of his older sisters

And to address your criticism: Yes, uniforms tend to promote group cohesion but that’s not always a bad thing. It encourages collaboration over competition, for example.

For me, the uniform was liberating. People who wanted to bully me needed to find something more substantive than just my clothes. Bullies tend to be stupid, so this was hard for them.

If your individuality is all tied up in your physical appearance, try to develop your mind a bit. I am nonconformist in a thousand ways, each of which is more important than how i dress.

I think it is. It’s a capitalist attempt to break the spirit of the young and get people ready for having to wear uniforms for work.

School uniforms level the outward socioeconomic presentation of students.

If it weren’t school uniforms, then the oppositional-defiant disorder would present in some students another way. Not statistically relevant.

It’s only authoritarian if the teachers / administration also wear a similar uniform, but slightly different to denote rank.

Otherwise, it’s actually accidentally kind of socialistic, in that the divisions of class between your peers becomes less obvious, and there’s more cohesion with your fellow students versus those in authority. It’s easier for the students to rally together against something when they’re all wearing the same thing.

Otherwise, it’s actually beneficial to authoritarians to have no dress code, because student cliques would strengthen, and infighting would be more common.

For the USA, think about how both major parties use color to help separate people. If the colors of Democrats and Republicans were the same though, the division would be weaker.

Uniforms have historically been used to unify groups rather than to control them.

Imo it’s much better than a cult of clothing brands.

Not at all. On the contrary, I found them quite liberating, for 2 main reasons:

• not having to decide what to wear every day
• I was in a British private school, where students came from upper middle class to upper class backgrounds. A lot of the really rich students were shallow, superficial, and cruel. If we didn’t have uniforms we would have had a serious bullying problem against those who couldn’t afford to wear high end/designer brands.

The only downside is that we had to pay for the uniforms, and they were quite expensive compared to the awful materials they were made of. I had 3 sets on rotation.

In elementary school we had a cheap (literally cheap, 5 euro) uniform that covered everything so it would protect the underneath clothes from inks, foods, spills. Also it didn’t matter if someone wore some expensive clothes as they were covered.

I noticed immediately from the first days in high school how something like that would have been useful as bullies would pick anyone about their clothing appearance. So there was an “unofficial” uniform, if you didn’t wear a brand name sweater then you were a loser to bully.

Now, I saw the elite schools uniform, expensive shirt under an expensive cardigan and a tie… that is ridiculous and I feel a way to take more money from the rich families as the expensive uniform can be bought only from them and need to purchase multiple sets to wear over a week

In my experience it seemed like uniforms were kinda another grift. You gotta buy everything just so from this specific place and you might never wear any of it again afterwards. I also got in trouble fairly frequently for accidentally having some part of my uniform out of order, which had more to do with forgetfulness or neurodivergence than anything.

At the same time, I didn’t really feel like it interfered with my ability to think critically or independently, but that might just be me. I was always weird enough that anyone who would have bullied me over clothes would’ve bullied me over other stuff, and my head was in the clouds anyway so I hardly noticed what I was wearing.

If anything, perhaps things like that biased my thinking in a libertarian direction, out of rebellion. It’s very easy to think that way when you’re young, and tired of parents and teachers telling you what to do.

My mind works differently from most people’s and my experiences may be atypical. But when I googled for studies I found mixed results, it doesn’t appear that there are conclusive results showing a correlation between uniforms and academic performance.

In any case, I think it’s that big of a deal. It is messed up, generally speaking, how little control kids have over their lives in the US and how people’s intrensic motivation is often killed off and they’re pushed around by extrensic motivators, rather than cooperating with what they actually want. I would say that uniforms can potentially contribute to that larger problem.

Schools in my area had a dress code, and my school almost succeeded at requiring a select jacket model as a must (done by a single local company connected to a school admin, wink-wink), but faced backlash over poor price/quality balance 🙃

One of the unusual upsides, many men well in their 20s, who otherwise couldn’t be bothered, had their high school formal suits to wear on future funerals and weddings. I was one of them and that was handy.

If the uniform should be there, to ensure it’s not hostile, it may be:

1. Of basic rules. Formal dresses, dark under the waist line, white over it.
2. Civilian models, without a glimpse of cop/military details and ranks, insignias.
3. Common to everyone without any color differentiation (and requirements to buy it in exact shade of a color).
4. Rather cheap or even subsidized, shared from older to younger kids, because children are frequently growing out of them and it’s a bummer to buy ten+ sets of dresses.
5. Purposely unisex and non-sexualized models.

Soccer uniforms have to be same color too it’s not “authoritarianism.”

Also idk about psychology but just a tiny bit of cohesion is much better over extreme individualism no?

Oh absolutely can be, and is absolutely often used as such.

However, as usual depends on the context. Properly subsidized it can help students not only gave greater pride in their appearance and success in classes if you aren’t having to worry about not getting good clothes or any that fit properly.

On the other hand it can be cripplingly over expensive and cheap ass.

My post history and reputation will back that I am left as fuck, but I love uniforms because I hate clothes and all the stupid ass stipulations society has purposely and inadvertently put on them. Spending any more than 5 secs selecting what’s gonna cover me for the day is already too long.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate all the ideological arguments made against them, and don’t counter them, I simply yearn to live in a world where we’re ALL on the same team and working together, and what one wears means fuck and all.

I work in schools. Pre-uniforms, there were so so many girls who arrived in appropriate clothes and then removed the top layer. Children shouldnt wear clothes to school that are more revealing than what you’d see in a bar. Social media teaches them that the goal is attention and it doesn’t matter if it’s positive or negative.