Re: But schools are not a right

Nor are they optional private clubs. School is not optional for kids; they are mandatory, something you're against.

As Baldur explained, they are not mandatory everywhere, and even where they are, there usually is some amount of school choice involved. Further, I would add that even if legally mandatory, enforcement is not the same everywhere, which you clearly are assuming too.

And yet you're for enforced school uniforms, which to me sounds like adding insult to injury. It is yet another rule/requirement for something that has too many all ready (according to YOU).

I think it is a reasonable rule for the kind of institutions they are. More reasonable than banning non-disruptive praying or junk food, for instance.

But in reality it's obvious that your interest in school uniforms stems from your a fetish you have for them.

First of all, I have a fetish for a specific (and yes, stereotypical) kind of uniforms: the pleated skirt or pinafore dress with a light sweater or sailor shirt, and close relatives of it like the cookie uniform.

Yet my call is general. There are school uniforms that are rather boring and not really particularly sexy to me, such as the Argentine public school white robe, the new British pants for girls, the Malaysian Mao-shirt and long skirt and about all "PE" uniforms that I know about, which is the only uniform in most schools in China, btw. Of course, the PE uniforms with shorts rather than long sweatpants can be sexy, but in my mind they are sexy because the shorts would be, not qua uniforms. The Thai miniskirt is on the same category - can be sexy as outfit, but doesn't feel like a uniform to my fetishizing. Any of those school uniforms (or any other you can think of, and even design to be unsexy, would do for my argument. The argument is whether uniforms are superior or not to the alternative - and it has to be independent of what the specific uniforms are.

Which brings me to my main point: that you, like most people in America and Germany (the two only large countries with an open aversion to school uniforms - and in the case of Germany many blame the post-Nazi trauma), assume that there is no good argument for school uniforms; that any apology has to be rooted in wanting to exert control over the children, homogenize them, stifle their sexuality (by implicitly banning some forms of sexual display) or its opposite, sexualizing them through our fetish. Well no, there are good arguments.

You, for instance, haven't countered that they are resilient to fads, or that they are cheaper, or that they contribute to habit formation by being a daily occurrence. All of which are problems in schools without uniforms. I went to schools without uniform all of my life, yet mostly in locations where both codes existed so I could always compare notes. I know, because I saw it, that children are bullied for wearing cheap clothes or old clothes (when their family cannot afford something else); for not conforming to fashion (which can be not because of the family income but because the family just won't buy a certain item or style); for "inheriting" an older sibling clothes; for wearing stuff that was "too sexy" or "not sexy enough", and so on. That is magically absent from uniform-wearing schools. Even though except for high school, all my non-uniform schools were little socially diverse, where the kids didn't differ all that much by family income or values. I can only imagine how much worse it would be in a very socially diverse school.

That's all.

And you will also have to explain why I have never said that schools should enforce smoking, pregnancy, braces and wetting.