Uniformity through Uniforms: One parent’s experience with school uniforms
discourse on school uniforms. We conclude that uniform policies may indirectly affect school environment and student outcomes by providing a visible and public symbol of commitment to school improvement and reform.
So the cost-benefit analysis winds up at least slightly positive and so let’s give them a try.
If this last statement seems correct to you, please think about it again. In particular is there some piece missing from our cost-benefit analysis? In management lingo, is there some stakeholder whose interests haven’t been accounted for? How about the students? Do they have any rights? Do their interests and feelings on the matter count for anything? Does anyone believe that if given complete freedom of choice the students would have opted for a school uniform requirement? I think this failure to accord students any significant rights or status with regard to their own lives and education is the most harmful feature of this kind of policy. We’re basically telling students: We’ll tell you what to do, when to do it, and even what to wear while you’re doing it. You just sit down, shut up, and get educated!
I’m not arguing against structured education. Obviously young children are not capable of taking control of their own lives and education. But as they mature we should steadily relax that structure and encourage the point of view that education is ultimately the responsibility of the student. The more control we give students over the process the more likely they are to become an active participant in seeking an education. The more control we take away from a student, the more we push him into becoming a passive or even unwilling participant. Any constraints we have to impose should be viewed as necessary evils. We mustn’t impose constraints arbitrarily believing that “well they can’t hurt.”
If logic and science don’t support a policy like school uniforms why is it so popular and what was the motivation behind creating it? I believe that the motivation for the school uniform policy as well as many others lies in a form of superstition called sympathetic magic. The idea of sympathetic magic is that in order to create phenomenon A you create a phenomenon B which is similar to A in some respect with the expectation that A will come into existence through some kind of resonance with B, like sympathetic vibrations in strings and other vibrating objects. Primitive peoples for example try to induce rain by sprinkling water or some other liquid on the ground or by making the sky appear cloudy with smoke or dust. This is surely the idea behind the theory that uniforms create unity of purpose – that wearing the same clothes will somehow cause people to be alike in other respects.
One of the forms of sympathetic magic postulates reverse causality: If the occurrence of A causes B then by creating B I will through reverse causality bring A into being. Conditions for rain cause the sky to be cloudy so making the sky “cloudy” will bring about rain; Rain causes the ground to become wet so making the ground wet will create rain. I believe that at heart uniform advocates are attempting to create a set of attitudes and values in our children, which would cause them to want to wear uniforms through reverse causality by making them wear uniforms.
So what kind of mental state are uniform advocates trying to create in our children? Whatever it is one can assume that it’s uniform across all children. It’s a state that revels in conformity. It is uncomfortable with individuality and differences of any sort. It is accepting of conventional views and group decisions without critical analysis, as critical analysis would imply at least the possibility of disagreement and therefore non-uniform behavior. These ideal students are a school administrator’s dream. They are without will and without spine. This is not a new ideal. In The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Marshall McLuhan described the educational ideal circa 1950 as follows:
“Our educational process is necessarily geared to eliminate all bone. The supple, well-adjusted man is the one who has learned to hop into the meat grinder while humming a hit-parade tune. Individual resistance to that process is labeled as destructive and uncooperative.”
McLuhan’s 1950 comparison of education to meat grinding strikes me as particularly apt today. In recent years executives, mostly retired, from the business community have become quite actively involved in education reform. These executives almost invariably see the value in applying modern industrial processes and operations research to improving the efficiency and quality of education. In order to scale to high volumes these processes depend on uniformity, predictability, and measurability. Quality is the result of applying uniform processing methods to