164. CHALLENGING UNIFORM - The Unwarranted Assumption Behind What Children Wear at School
In my Junior Philosophy Club this week, inspired by André Spicer’s recent opinion piece in the Guardian, I asked my students why they think they have to wear school uniform.
Their answers were all to be expected - ideas about forming a distinct school identity, as well as identifying people who should and shouldn’t be on site; ideas about equality and preventing bullying; ideas about not wearing inappropriate or offensive clothes if left to their own devices (such as t-shirts with sweary slogans on them); and ideas about needing to look smart. I told them that the plan was not to do any deep philosophical thinking about any of those ideas, and to accept them all completely without argument. Where the philosophy would come in would be in analysing the further arguments schools in the UK then make from these assumptions that the uniform students must wear to accomplish all those aims is some sort of formal suit or business-wear.
I asked my students if it necessarily followed from the idea that students needed to share a distinct identity, have a way of identifying intruders on the school site, minimise inequalities, prevent bullying, and look both appropriate and smart, that the only possible way for them to do all this was to dress in blazers, shirts and ties?
Very quickly they told me that a comfortable hoodie emblazoned with a school logo would do just as good a job at creating a shared and equal collective identity, free from inappropriate slogans, as a traditional suit does and would have the added benefit of being more comfortable. A hoodie and t-shirt combo, enabling them to dress for both hot and cold weather, would be ideal.
The sticking point came with the idea of looking ‘smart’ though. Would a hoodie or t-shirt look sufficiently ‘smart’? And what are we wearing below our branded hoodies and t-shirts - jeans? Other kinds of trousers? Shorts?
At this point I decided to delve a little deeper with them into the meaning of words like ‘appropriate’ and ‘smart’. I noted how the formal jacket and tie they were currently wearing looked smart and appropriate here and now, in a school within a country where such suits are the norm for school uniform, but they would look wildly over-dressed in a Finnish or American classroom! Or, indeed, in a few years time at university, where no requirements for formal businesswear would be demanded of them as they study. What is considered appropriate changes depending on the context.
I also shared with them some interesting statistics from the Spicer piece: “while schools have become increasingly strict about what children wear, the world of work has, by contrast, become much less exacting and increasingly informal. Only about 5% of workplaces actually have uniforms, and over half of British workplaces require either business casual or casual dress. Thirty percent of people working from home admit to having worked in their pyjamas. Sales of formal work attire like suits and ties have declined by 40% in the last five years. A YouGov survey found that 92% of people now say it is acceptable not to wear a tie to work, and 66% think it is OK to wear shorts.”
What used to be ‘smart’ at work is no longer necessarily what people today would think of as ‘smart’. ‘Smart’, like ‘appropriate’, is a fluid and ever-changing concept (that sweary t-shirt slogan might be utterly appropriate at a comedy club. Jeans and a hoodie may look utterly smart on a night out at the right venue).
I proposed a little thought experiment: imagine a world in which the norm is that all school students wore a uniform of jeans and a hoodie. If that were the world you lived in, would you consider a student wearing that uniform to look ‘smart’?
My students agreed that they probably would - that would just be the norm of smartness in that other world. Different from our current world, but not necessarily wrong.
I proposed a second thought experiment: suppose there were two worlds, this one, in which you wear your current school uniform and follow the rule that your shirt has to be tucked in to look ‘smart’, and a second world where everything is exactly the same except you do not ever have your shirt tucked in. Would you, I asked them, have better educational outcomes in one world over the other?
‘A tucked shirt has nothing to do with education’, one student astutely replied.
Which was interesting. Because, I pointed out, the purpose of school was supposed to be education, and all the things we do in school are meant to be aimed at that goal. Though not on their original list of reasons for uniform, there had to be some underlying assumption that feeling a sense of identity, of being safe, of feeling equal and unbullied, etc., would ultimately lead to a better learning environment too. That looking smart was somehow important for education. Or, that the wearing of the uniform itself was a form of pedagogy: education about having to wear whatever an organisation tells you in the future. Perhaps at your future job?
But as the Spicer piece noted, jobs these days are doing that less and less. And as the astute student had already said: looking smart wasn’t really about education. Furthermore, our definition of smart is in the eye of the beholder. Smart could be jeans and a hoodie if jeans and a hoodie were how we choose to define looking ‘smart’.
It was interesting, I said, that those of us enforcing these uniform rules - teachers - are all people working within the teaching bubble, unexposed to the realities of workplace dress-codes outside of education (or even outside of secondary education. I remember the looks I got a few years ago at a university seminar series I used to attend after work. The only person there in a suit, having come straight from school!) And if you’ve read my recent book looking back on my teaching career, you will be aware of my longtime war with an old Head teacher about his views on the necessity of men wearing ties. Why are we trying to educate students about what the workplace will be like when we have no idea what we are talking about? The only workplace we are preparing them for is the increasingly anachronistic school!
So I asked the students again - even if we accept the need for school uniform uncritically (which is, itself, up for debate), is there any logical reason that this uniform needs to be a suit? Formal businesswear? Jackets and ties? Sensible haircuts? No jewellery or makeup?
No, was their conclusion.
We realised that there was a big, and unjustifiable, leap that has been made to get from the starting assumption of needing a uniform to the end conclusion that children need to be dressing up everyday like businesspeople from a bygone age. That even if you wanted to justify the idea of enforcing a uniform, you needed to go a long way further from that to justify the bizarre uniforms most schools actually make their poor students wear.
It would be nice if schools, as places of supposed education, woke up about this unwarranted assumption behind their traditional rules for acceptable dress and began reimagining what a uniform could be (if they remain committed to the idea) once unshackled from their cartoonish notions of what people wear in the workplace. If a bunch of eleven year olds could see through the faulty reasoning of current uniform policies in just a few minutes during their lunch break, you’d have thought those adults with the paid responsibility of thinking about them should be able to do it too.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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