Antitonic said:
Granted, it's a tricky issue. From my experience, schools would be a much better learning environment without the students.
*Bum-dum-tish*
The way I see it, uniforms are a socially acceptable form of conditioning for later life. One which I fail to see any big deal about. Then again, I've come through the system, so maybe it's the brainwashing at work?
I think it's absurd. But then again, I don't think school public school should be compulsory, in the highly idealistic sense that wouldn't be compatible with our current society. All of my opinions are absurd.
I wouldn't call it brainwashing, that's too hysterical, and the way it all works is far more subtle. We are all socially conditioned in some way, our perspectives are created by a variety of social and biological factors. I've never been forced to wear a certain type of clothing in or out of school, except for certain events. Marching band, weddings, funerals, ect. and in those cases, I certainly don't object to wearing that type of clothing. Why? That's the social conditioning. I know it would be considered disrespectful to other people if I, for example, wore a clown costume to someone's funeral and shouted "Wa-zooks! what a
fun-eral!"
But take someone from a tribal community, where there is no marching band, and their weddings and funerals are completely different, and he will probably have a similar objection to those things as I have to school uniforms.
There are so many things that we look at as just "common sense" because we're used to it. And it's not until we take a step back that we realize what we're actually doing, and how grossly illogical many of our assumptions are, and how many of them can actually be harmful to people.
I mean, think about it. For the first 12 years of their life, our society forces children to spend a major percentage of their life at school, which are designed, in many ways, like factories, because the original purpose of them was to produce factory workers, to produce the next working generation. Our schools are no different today, their purpose is to produce what the current working world demands, which, in the grand scheme of things, is obedient, skilled workers. Essentially what schools do is fulfill what the working, corporate world wants.
Am I the only one that sees that as completely fucked up, even immoral? Instead of pursuing an approach with the goal in mind of developing people to their full capacity, so they can achieve happiness and fulfillment, something based on psychology, sociology, biology, and basically everything else we know about how humans work, we are listening to corporations and businesses. I think it should be the other way around.
So, apply that my perspective to school uniforms: In short, fuck what the working, corporate world wants, they don't know what's best for the world. I say instead we design a school system based on what humanism instead.
