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.

No. The uniformity somewhat eliminates kids being picked on for being poor and not having the best department store clothes. Children will always be little shits to each other but uniforms at least removes one reason.

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 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.

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.

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

I loved school uniforms as a deeply autistic young man who really, REALLY struggled with all the silent peer pressures of fashion.

There was an outfit I could wear without half a thought every day and no one cared.

There are valid arguments for and against, but I really don’t think the word ‘authoritarianism’ is at all applicable here.

I absolutely do, within reason and within legal limits, school kids should be able to wear whatever they want as it’s a big part of their self expression.

Also, for things like art class, which can and will get very messy, very fast, especially with younger kids, school uniforms are just flat-out impractical vs. wearing old clothes you don’t care about, eg. for clay day or for paper mache day or anything else like that, although ideally for stuff like this, you’d provide some old slightly oversized shirts to begin with that can be smudged with paint or clay or whatever without fear, effectively acting as smocks.

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.

They’re about training children to comform and obbey arbitrary rules created by people in position of authority and to value impression more than behaviour.

Of the countries I lived in, Britain was the one that had most of this shit and was also the one with the strongest “know your place” and “keep up appearences” mindsets of them all, especially amongst the middle and upper classes which were the ones were this shit was more common (there was a time of working class cultural significance during the 70s and 80s, which were a veritable explosion of creativity with movements like “punk”, but the social mobility and freedom that created it were crushed in the meanwhile, so working class kids can’t make it in the Arts anymore and that whole class is back at being culturally irrelevant outside fighting each other after football games).

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

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.

I think all schools in Brazil have uniform, even private ones. No such thing as “physical education uniform”, tho, you sweat on the same shirt you stay in class, so everyone is kind of forced to have 5 fucking uniform shirts and 2-3 pairs of pants and shorts, which makes it feel more like free money extortion rather than anything else.

I don’t know enough about school history in my country to really tell whether this is some form of authoritarian bullshit or not, since there was some sort of education reform during the dictatorship (1964-1985) which led to a significant increase in private schools since, as “public school” became synonymous with “shit education”, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it originated from that line of thought. I mean, schools here operate on assembly line logic, so uniforms make perfect sense.

I suppose it probably seems strange to an outsider but in a country where it’s the norm for every school, it didn’t feel like that to me at all. I see it more as an equaliser? In a way I also kind of miss not having to decide what to wear every day.

Honestly, my main concern about school uniforms is that I think they ought to be standardised and subsidised, because the expense can sometimes be a problem.