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High school uniforms.
Sanius
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What do you all think of this?
My High School, East Central, along with all TPS (Tulsa Public Schools) High Schools (such as Memorial and Booker T) are pushing to much more strict uniform policies. Startin this monday, all males must tuck in their shirts, excluding females. And starting this fall, all TPS high schools will be going into uniforms.
Say good bye to the relaxing nature of high school, and wearing what you choose to wear. All of TPS High Schools must say hello to plain colored buttoned up t-shirts with the colors of the school, and khaki/black pants. No longer can I walk into school wearing my Metallica or Pantera T-shirt, or even my Fender guitar T-Shirt. I'm going to walk into what will feel like a re-do of middle school. TPS has told us that from the first day of high school, we will be treated as adults. So what's with the hypocrisy? I can understand somewhat, I mean, most jobs require a very strict uniform policy, but shouldn't school be somewhat casual? If we're adults, let us do as we choose when deciding what we wear.
Their thoughts on the first issue (all T-Shirts must be tucked in) is that prominent gang members or other students may try and conceal weapons or drugs. They have to be bullshitting me.
I and many other people I know are amazing students, but suddenly, we're caught in the crossfire with some bad kids who can't follow the rules. How come our schools five security guards and large staff cannot keep these kids out of the school? I can find a kid wearing blood colors, complete with a hanker chef and a binder written with "crip killer", sagging to his knees, and no one blinks an eye.
I have no idea what to think of this, it all sounds like a cop-out. Recently a lot of benchmark tests ordered by TPS have been dumbed down from previous years, probably because our scores are so low.
What do you all think of this, and high school uniforms overall?
(I hate Oklahoma.)
My High School, East Central, along with all TPS (Tulsa Public Schools) High Schools (such as Memorial and Booker T) are pushing to much more strict uniform policies. Startin this monday, all males must tuck in their shirts, excluding females. And starting this fall, all TPS high schools will be going into uniforms.
Say good bye to the relaxing nature of high school, and wearing what you choose to wear. All of TPS High Schools must say hello to plain colored buttoned up t-shirts with the colors of the school, and khaki/black pants. No longer can I walk into school wearing my Metallica or Pantera T-shirt, or even my Fender guitar T-Shirt. I'm going to walk into what will feel like a re-do of middle school. TPS has told us that from the first day of high school, we will be treated as adults. So what's with the hypocrisy? I can understand somewhat, I mean, most jobs require a very strict uniform policy, but shouldn't school be somewhat casual? If we're adults, let us do as we choose when deciding what we wear.
Their thoughts on the first issue (all T-Shirts must be tucked in) is that prominent gang members or other students may try and conceal weapons or drugs. They have to be bullshitting me.
I and many other people I know are amazing students, but suddenly, we're caught in the crossfire with some bad kids who can't follow the rules. How come our schools five security guards and large staff cannot keep these kids out of the school? I can find a kid wearing blood colors, complete with a hanker chef and a binder written with "crip killer", sagging to his knees, and no one blinks an eye.
I have no idea what to think of this, it all sounds like a cop-out. Recently a lot of benchmark tests ordered by TPS have been dumbed down from previous years, probably because our scores are so low.
What do you all think of this, and high school uniforms overall?
(I hate Oklahoma.)
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Sanius on
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I thought that was worth a good laugh. Also, I hate school uniforms and am 100% against them for no real reason.
3DS: 2852-6809-9411
I've noticed that most people who are opposed to uniforms are either still at the age where they have to wear one themselves and just want to fight the power for no real reason, or they totally overreact and make ridiculous statements like "omg uniforms will surpress your personality and turn kids into mindless robot communists".
Well, one could certainly make the argument that it is forcing kids to be more alike, at least temporarily
Me, I hate uniforms but I'm not touching the argument.
Regardless, I kind of like the idea of uniforms, period. They keep the focus on school, as opposed to the daily fashion show of what everyone else is wearing. You're there to learn.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Well, communists do have uniforms... As do a good number of education systems in other countries, like Japan. I personally really liked wearing my elementary school uniform, and wished that it had been the standard attire instead of special-occasion attire. I guess I can sort of understand the whole "I don't want other people deciding what I'm going to wear" thing, but I really think it's more just an adolescent knee-jerk reaction to, you know, those fucking grown-ups, man, they just want to fucking ruin our lives, you know? I might be more sympathetic if it were really ridiculously hideous uniforms, but most/all uniforms I've seen make kids look nice, not retarded.
Also, as for the whole gang colors etc thing. It's hard to enforce if you consider it from the administrator's point of view. The fact that someone is dressed completely like a gangster is not sufficient legal basis to say that they are gangsters. Even if everyone KNOWS that Johnny is a member of the Crips and sells drugs during lunch hour in the north-west corner of the main quad, the administration can't do anything unless they can provide solid proof of his activities. If you kick kids out of school just because you can "pick out his blood colors" at a glance, that's almost just begging to be sued.
I don't like uniforms in schools. They certainly didn't prevent cliques from forming in grade school or prevent kids from being teased. Unpopular kids were merely teased over the brand of their backpack or binder instead of clothing. I also have vivid memories of the kids one grade lower than me who wouldn't let one of their classmates play tag with them because her family was the only one without a VCR. (Little kids are such cruel little bastards.)
The high school I went to was much better. There were cliques, but not a lot of rivalry or tension between them and most people were friendly towards everyone, or at least not hostile. It was a private school and very academic. Despite the fact that grunge was in at the time, the look didn't cause students to become slovenly in their schoolwork.
Just to be clear, I'm not implying that school uniforms at the grade school was what caused the kids to be nasty little monsters. I think it's pretty inevitable in the grade school / middle school grades (especially middle school.) Uniforms can't stop it. Nothing can stop it.
So in my opinion uniforms add nothing useful, while simultaneously preventing kids from being able to express themselves in the way they dress. (I did think they looked cool in the first two Harry Potter movies, though. But that's Hogwarts, it's special.)
(For the record, I'm not a teen raging against "the man." High school is looong behind me.)
Edit: This was the plaid of the uniforms in my grade school, if anyone's curious. Girls could wear skirts or jumpers of the plaid with a white skirt. Boys and girls could both wear white shirts with blue pants or blue shorts.
T-Nation blog
It was about this young boy in England circa the early 1980's, written in a first person perspective.
He has to go to school, but one day he can't find the socks that go with his uniform. So, he finds what he can use, which is a pair of red socks. Eventually, he gets caught and the headmaster or whatever brings him in front of his schoolmates and gives him detention as a warning against others who "didn't want to conform."
Then it goes off from there, where a lot of the students thought that his wearing red socks was some sort of political commentary on his part, as the headmaster was a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher. Then he and his would-be girlfriend form a group called the Pink Brigade. I thought the whole book was quite charming.
A kid who's interested in learning will learn no matter what they're wearing. If not, they won't. No one in my high school was jumping up in the middle of class to say "OH MY GOD, I LOVE THAT BLOUSE!!!" Clothing was not a distraction in the least.
The guy's uniform during my highschool years was pretty decent, however their were always complaints from the girl's sides on how uncomfortable the pants were.
I do think it's silly when you have to wear the uniform of a certain brand. At my school we all had to wear McCarthy's clothes, if girls got caught wearing black pants that looked almost exactly the same but weren't McCarthy, they would get introuble.
3DS: 2852-6809-9411
That being said, now that I'm out of high school, I think it's a brilliant idea because none of those emotional/moral things matter anymore and I can look at it from a purely logical point of view based upon the teasing/gang colors etc. Incidentally, this is the same reason I don't bitch about having to be 18 to buy cigarettes anymore, and the reason why I probably won't care about the legal drinking age in 2 years.
I had typed up quite a long pro-clique argument here, but decided against it and will just leave it at this.
You won't. Even a little. I mean, I still think it's stupid that it's not 18, but I hardly ever bring it up.
That should tell you about the ghetto level of my school.
It doesn't have to be that obvious for clothing to be a distraction. In some cases schools are requiring uniforms to cut down on ultra-sexxxay girls' (or boys') outfits***; as already mentioned, sometimes it's to defuse gang tensions, or to de-emphasize class issues. In schools where there's a dress code instead of a true uniform, like mine, there was still plenty of room for individual expression. In schools where there is a uniform, how is eliminating personal expression through clothing having a negative impact on education?
By they way, I totally agree that kids predisposed to learn or not to learn will find ways to do so regardless of clothing. There's a tremendous middle ground, however.
***I know that sounds awful, but when you're stuck with middle schools wracked by hormones and unsure how to handle sexuality, unfortunately showing skin is a tremendous distraction.
The diary of Adrian Mole?
Conversely to both arguments, it's friggin' stupid to control that much about a kid. His clothes won't stop his learning. My school had very, very rare 'no uniform' days, and you know what? Even during a kid's birthday, where only he got to wear what he wanted, things didn't suddenly go to shit. The kid wasn't mocked if his clothes were cheap, he was mocked if he was annoying or too smart or too dumb or other non-monetary-things. We worked fine when we weren't forced to wear what others wanted.
I'm not saying it'll automatically turn all kids into little mindless cogs in the machine of the man, but it sure as fuck isn't needed.
EDIT: This was in my elementary school, by the way. Middle school had no uniforms, just a vague dress code. Which at least normally makes SENSE.
And we had uniforms. Simple loose shirt and shorts, perfect for the subtropics. I liked them, for the aforementioned 'not-having-to-obssess-about-clothes-every-morning' thing - plus, my nice clothes never got ruined via schoolyard rowdiness (we played a neverending no-holds-barred game of bottlecap soccer on concrete, so this was a real concern :P) or classroom messes. People form the same social structures regardless of what they're wearing, but the clothes did foster a certain sense of belonging, I think. And they did reduce the financial burden on the poorer families, because two sets of uniform would last several years - hell, mine lasted four.
Oh, the poor kids with their teasing and expressing their individuality and being forced to do things to get an education. A BLOO BLOO BLOO
The most powerful reason for uniforms from an administrators point of view is one of security. People stand out more if they haven't adopted the uniform, and if they have adopted the uniform in order to infiltrate then you're no worse off than you would be if you had no unifoms.
Anecdotally, and repeated from the last time this issue came up, my parents were both teachers, my father was the deputy principal of the school I attended. The stress levels of the staff went up when there were out-of-uniform or "mufti" days. SImply because there was no longer any way to tell who should and shouldn't be there. The number of trespassing incidents went up on such days and were harder to identify - culminating one day in a girl buying drugs, taking them and collapsing into seizure in class (quite shocking for my somewhat small and conservative hometown and the first such incident ever). Likewise, no one was ever discovered to take the time of camoflaging themselves in order to inflitrate the school.
I'm pretty sure Philadelphia's currently winning the "most ghetto public high schools" pissing contest.
That'd be it. In the same book (I think), the headmaster bans studs on any item of clothing except football boots after Barry Kent (the school nutcase) comes to school in a studded leather jacket, t-shirt and vest. Immediately after the ban was put in place, a gang of girls rushed out to put studs on the hems of their underskirts.
Which brings me to what I see as a useful point about uniforms: kids are always going to try and push the limits of what's acceptable, so you might as well set the ostensible limit pretty low. The way you could tell if a kid wanted to be seen as a big tough guy in my secondary school was by his untucked shirt and loose tie - he was Fighting the Man, a Rebel Without a Single-Coloured Jacket.
Rules about jewellery and stuff are there for liability's sake, I guess; when Little Crystall gets her finger stripped to the bone after getting her ring caught in PE, it's a lot easier for the school to dodge some of the flak.
I don't think that uniforms are a cure-all for class separation. It's not as though one can't tell the difference between the kid driving up in his Benz that he got for his 16th birthday and the kid who was bussed in to school from the "other" side of the tracks just because they both are wearing white polos and khakis. That separation is still going to be there and it's still going to be noticeable. Will eliminating the clothing difference help to alleviate this? Possibly. But unless the school provides all the clothes the kid will ever need, the kid with the rich parents are going to be able to afford a new white polo while Mr. Bus' polo has gotten dingy with age.
1 ) They are uncomfortable- too hot in summer, too cold in winter
2 ) I don't think a single person at my school (which is actually a good school) bothered with keeping their unifrom tidy, so everybody looks increadible untidy.
3 ) Rules like having to do up top buttons, wear ties, tuck in shirts just cause pointless hassle for the teachers, as nobody follows them so teachers just spend futile hours in detentions, berating pupils, etc.
4 ) Everbody looks the same, so it's hard to find the people you are looking for
5 ) School uniform suits very few people, so most kids look weird
6 ) Everbody always pushes the uniform rules as far as they can, so the uniforms aren't uniform (which I think is their purpose)
7 ) They often cost more than normal clothes
I am now in sixth form at my school, and so don't have to wear a uniform. I am now far more comfortable than I was, don't feel self-conscious about what I'm wearing (I looked stupid/scruffy in our school uniform) and am generally more relaxed.
My opinion is probably biased, but I think that school uniform rules should only exist in the most limited fashion (enough to stop extremes of dress).
My middle school (7th and 8th) had a mandatory and strictly enforce dress code. This was after the summer in which 4-5 gang related shootings had occurred near or in the school. Sadly, our school colors were deep gold and baby shit green, so uniforms based on our colors wasn't going to look pretty. The dress code forced everyone to not wear Dickies (???), wear either white, green or gold polos, and black or blue slacks/shorts/dresses. Fights still broke out and I was a signature away from transfering.
My high school had no uniform but it had a short list of what not to wear (gang attire, offensive shit, etc). There was talk about it for the last two years but it ended because a large group of people (ROTC, clubs, sports teams, etc) were against having to worry about so many sets of clothes. I didn't care whether we did or didn't, I did like having to only worry about a half dozen polos and slacks being clean and not the convoluted wardrobe that comes with being a teen. I was on the soccer and volleyball teams in high school so uniforms wasn't going to happen.
Seemed to work ok at my school. Your mileage may vary I suppose.
And the pluses are all there in this thread: teachers know who's theirs, which is especially important if you want to take year eights anywhere out of school, students can learn some handy skills about presentation for that annoying place called the rest of their life, no one has to worry about ruining good clothes, or not having enough clothes.
As for the downsides, well, teachers would spend as much time going after revealing/offensive/retarded clothing as they do chasing down uniform offenses anyway, wearing cheap and crappy clothes just means you can spend your lunch time shredding threads with joyous abandon, and every teenager looks like a monger anyway a fact which has nothing to do with their awkward looking uniform.
Anything before then, uniforms are easier for all the reasons mentioned above.
pro: promote learning. con: suppress individuality
sorry, but I have to agree, school is for learning, its not a fashion show. pimp your clothes outside of school, that's where the really interesting stuff happens anyway.
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