One of the peculiarities of British cultural life is our willingness to support rules and conventions with arguments that have little to do with – and even run contrary to – the reasoning that led to their introduction. The monarchy may well have its roots in military force, land appropriation and vassalage, but we retain it because, we think, it is good for tourism and a source of national pride and unity. The same applies to the UK’s antique system of titles and honours, a reward for the loyalty of feudal gangsters rebranded as a way of recognizing achievement in public life or service. It survives, despite its ugly associations with colonialism, as a means, primarily, of rewarding support (financial support, especially) to the ruling party or its leader. Likewise, grammar schools, those bright, shiny engines of inequality and social segregation, are defended, against all the evidence, as vehicles of social mobility, choice and fairness. These are distortions of language, words used misleadingly to perpetuate institutions that would otherwise be quickly recognized as straightforwardly harmful. But they are also testament to our remarkable capacity to believe things that aren’t true just because we would like them to be. We are very good at coming up with benign justifications for customs and conventions that are, in all honesty, anything but.
One of the most interesting examples of this phenomenon is the UK’s almost universal attachment to school uniforms. They are mandatory in most British schools and in many former British colonies and have been for decades. The sight of children dressed in ties and blazers to learn is so common that it is seldom questioned or thought about in a critical way. It’s just the best way to do it, isn’t it? But it is important to note just how much of an outlier the UK is in this respect, at least among comparable countries. While the practice has been adopted by many countries in Asia, the UK and Ireland are the only countries in Europe to widely apply a compulsory uniform code for children in state schools. Few European countries have any sort of tradition of uniform codes, and there is little demand to change this. In fact, in most places their introduction would be met with strenuous opposition, not only because of the additional expense involved but also, and I suspect most importantly, because there is no problem for which school uniforms would be seen as a solution. There is no evidence, for example, that school uniforms improve pupils’ behaviour or help children learn. And while some studies have shown a link between uniforms and reduced bullying, other studies reveal little or no impact. So, why are uniforms thought of as indispensable to learning in schools in the UK?
Perhaps the most important reason is tradition. The modern school uniform has its origins in sixteenth-century England, where poor ‘charity children’ at Christ’s Hospital boarding school wore blue cloaks and yellow stockings to convey their lowly status. Uniforms were not taken up by wealthy private schools (‘public’ schools in polite English doublespeak) until the nineteenth century, when the Eton suit was introduced. Other private and grammar schools followed this example, usually preferring caps to Eton’s proudly patrician top hats. They became important symbols of privilege and wealth. After the Elementary Education Act 1870 established elementary education on a national scale in England and Wales, grammar schools introduced uniforms more widely to distinguish their pupils from poorer ‘school board’ kids who wore no uniform. Once secondary school education had become free to all and the school leaving age was raised to 15 after World War II, school uniforms gradually became more widespread and, eventually, ubiquitous. While it is still not compulsory for schools to adopt uniforms – each school can write its own policy – the government strongly encourages them to do so and almost every school follows this advice, usually opting for the classic shirt, stiff collar, tie and blazer combination and often applying their often highly detailed and prescriptive rules extremely strictly. We are all like the private schools now, just not as good. And that, of course, is very much the point. From the start, uniforms have served as markers of status.
The proponents of school uniforms – and there are very many, including among pupils themselves – say that school uniforms foster a sense of belonging and institutional pride. They reduce bullying, they say (since children are sometimes bullied because of how they dress, and this won’t happen if everyone is dressed the same), and promote equality among pupils (not real equality, of course, more equality of footwear). Pupils, furthermore, will be more focused on their studies and achieve better results, it is argued. Uniforms also improve attendance, discipline and punctuality. This is an impressive list of claims, and some may have elements of truth in them. The main problem though is that the substantive claims – that uniforms raise achievement, reduce bullying and promote equality – are not well-supported by the evidence, which is inconclusive at best. There is little evidence, for example, of a link between uniform codes and academic standards. Finland, the best-performing education system in the world (with outcomes the UK education system cannot begin to match), for example, has no school uniforms. And while some studies have suggested a link between uniforms and a reduction in bullying, others have found no evidence of this. It is not really much of a social leveller either, since the poorer kids are more likely still to be in ill-fitting or second-hand uniforms and social segregation is more extreme between schools than within them. More generally, school uniforms are signifiers not of unity but of hierarchy. In Britain, where wealthy people seldom school their children alongside those of poorer people, they can tell you what part of town a child is from, what kind of jobs their parents are likely to do, how big their house is, whether it is owned or rented, and what their prospects are likely to be. Thus, uniforms accentuate the very social distinctions they are supposed to overcome.
The strict enforcement measures in place in many schools – and the insistence on a code of dress that is weirdly out of step with the fast-changing, increasingly informal world of work – suggest that there is something at play here other than a desire to promote a level playing field and boost achievement. It is common for children to be sent home for not wearing the correct uniform or to have items of clothing considered ‘inappropriate’ confiscated. For girls, such strict policies extend to skirt length and material and the thickness of their tights. There are rules too about make-up, nails and hair styles. Uniform policies are heavily gendered (for many schools, trousers are still the preserve of boys), with girls’ dress choices much more likely to be scrutinised for ‘appropriateness’. So much for fostering a sense of belonging. In fact, none of this, if we are honest about it, has anything to do with academic achievement or student wellbeing. It is about control and compliance, exercised over a part of people’s lives which is, for many, highly personal and private. It is about conformity and the intrusive hand of government. It is about learning to jump when told to jump and not asking why. As such, it goes to the heart of the question of the type of education we want for our children. Do we think the purpose of education is to force every type of peg into one type of hole? Or do we want our schools to be places of possibility where, as bell hooks writes in Teaching to transgress, ‘we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress’.
As a square peg who experienced school as a series of doors slamming in my face before I had a chance to understand what was behind them, I very much want it to be different for my children. I would like it to be different for everybody’s children. I don’t want schools to be places where compliance is rewarded and those who don’t fit or see the world differently are punished and left behind. I would rather teachers and school leaders were focused on teaching and learning and not on what their pupils happen to wear. I would rather they appreciated the difference that difference makes. Schools need to change, just as education more generally needs to change. It needs to support collaboration and co-production of knowledge, creativity and critical thinking, dialogue and possibility. It’s no longer enough to educate people to be units of production but not much more. Truthfully, it never was. The adult education movement has, over many decades, expressed people’s appetite for this something more, an unrealised desire to transform and transgress, to resist and challenge, to effect change and remake the world. It continues to do so, in spite rather than because of the actions of government. The problems of the twenty-first century demand something other than more of the same. Schools should be places in which everyone is comfortable being who they are and becoming who they might be. And for that we need children who are willing and empowered to deviate from the norm and an education system that acknowledges and values difference. Finding and fostering difference, opening doors of possibility rather than closing them, is what transformative teaching is all about. Uniforms, with their emphasis on control and compliance, standardised learning and standardised learners, belong to the past. They are not at all what we need now. It’s time we moved on.
The Learning Age 