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.

Honestly I kinda liked our school uniforms when I was a kid. Course for us it was just like jeans and a solid color Polo. Maybe khakis were allowed as well, I don’t recall. Made things easy made things simple.

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

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.

No.

Oh absolutely can be, and is absolutely often used as such.

However, as usual depends on the context. Properly subsidized it can help students not only gave greater pride in their appearance and success in classes if you aren’t having to worry about not getting good clothes or any that fit properly.

On the other hand it can be cripplingly over expensive and cheap ass.

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.

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.

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.

Yep. They also seem to completely ignore neurodiverse people; I don’t know what I’d have done if my school had uniforms.

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 didn’t have good casual clothes in school.

On the other hand, the uniforms were priced to the point of extortion, so I’d say they came off as elitist flexing, if not authoritarian.

The only winner is getting kids decent clothes that aren’t expensive or drab. And yes, there absolutely is a middle ground for that.

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

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).

Yes. Even though it has nothing to do with the government. It’s also fascist.