The Terms and Conditions of Uniform #1

Inevitably, each new school year brings controversy around the question of uniform, and how strictly policy around it should be enforced. What often goes unquestioned, however, is the actual state of affairs that underlies the entire debate, and the wider process that uniform policy is actually involved in. 

This year, Hampstead has been without notable upset with regards to uniform, but it is still very much a school with uniform. What does it actually mean though, that it has a uniform? The Trash is no stranger to the problems that uniform can give rise to, but the annual debate, and indeed spectacle around uniform makes it clear that there is still much that needs to be said.

Take this case, from Kepier School, in Houghton: 'Pupils at a Sunderland school were forced to “line up in the rain” while teachers colour-matched their trousers to make sure they had been bought from the right shop.' Absurd doesn't quite cut it. As absurd as it might sound however, it is reality, and it is not somehow completely out of the ordinary. Such events are the product of the essentially "normal" principles and ideas we accept every day, only taken further perhaps, than they normally are.

One parent wrote:

“Children who got sent home were the children who did not follow the rules. These children and their parents is what is wrong with this world today. They don’t want to follow rules nor act as they should because they put themselves above the rules."

Others might say that it is actually those who unquestioningly follow "the rules" to the extent that what they actually are no longer matters, and they now only occupy a symbolic place in their thought and language, beyond rationality, that represent a problem in the world. Usually following rules as inane and pedantic as those requiring that clothing be bought from a specific shop has to be rationalized in some instrumental way, in terms of not 'creating trouble' or 'hardship'. The only way someone could bring themselves to spout drivel as vacuous as above is if they had forgone even the process of rationalization that upholds "the rules", particularly those that plainly make no sense and are often actually detrimental to the process of learning.

Here, as a response, we are faced with the classic line of argument that goes something like: 'Management may make some decisions that look absurd or nonsensical to us, but they can see things we can't, and even if some their decisions have some unsavory consequences, it's for the greater good of the school'. With uniform for example, some might suggest that even if uniform is irrelevant (or even detrimental) to the process of learning, its presence can positively influence the image of a school and/or the result of an inspection. Some might go on to argue that a better image and/or better inspection results can lead to increased funding. Regardless of any financial benefit or lack thereof, what this argument does not take into account is that at almost every level, within and beyond and individual school, many of the decisions taken by those in management positions appear absurd and nonsensical, and to justify it, similar arguments must be made over and over again. It is the same form of obscure bureaucratic arrangement as the kind we see in school management that, in local government and national government, gives rise to the conditions where schools have apparently 'no choice' but to make absurd and compromising decisions. Schools formulate this kind of policy to game the system, but the system exists almost entirely as a collection of different people and organisations trying to game it. The principles that give rise to this kind of system have to be rejected in every place and form that they appear, because once they do appear, they very quickly subvert the process of thought, leaving it nothing more than a tool for gaming a strange and arbitrary system of inspections, targets, and performance indicators.