They said shirts like the boys wear, rather than blouses…which means those of us who develop early have to deal with buttons popping open unless we use safety pins, which in turn makes it hard to change for gym (speaking from personal experience).
I love the ending of the article:
Meanwhile, boys ditched their trousers for skirts to help beat the heatwave at Whitchurch High School in Cardiff. The Year 10 boys were promptly ordered to put their trousers back on earlier this month.
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Wouldn’t you just get a shirt big enough to accommodate your boobs? (assuming they made them big enough)
Or a girls-cut button up shirt? One assumes the blouses they’re referring to are open-necked. They DO make button up shirts cut for girls.
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No, and that’s not what was said either. Nifty straw man you’ve constructed though.
You know, back when I was nine, in 1968, FFS, we had the exact same problem. No one considered banning skirts on girls. In fact, trousers on girls were banned.
Specific problems with high school uniforms: The kids wear backpacks over the blazers, which looks atrocious. (In winter they wear the backpacks over puffy down jackets over the blazers, like they never heard of an overcoat.) After school they untuck their shirts, which compounds the aesthetic offense. Often they put on sneakers and a ballcap, which I can’t even…
As if we needed more reasons to send teenagers off to boarding school.
Then you either have to make adjustments to the sleeves or else keep them rolled up (which often isn’t allowed) and you need pants another size bigger for tucking in all the extra material: a shirt cut for a male but worn by a large-chested female is HUGE everywhere else.
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It’s almost as if dressing up kids in uniforms creates problems rather than solving them.
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I’m kind of impressed at the self-restraint of BB readers, that it took 69 posts for a thread on uniforms to be Godwinned.
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20 bucks, same as it is in town.
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I did consider it on the first post. It must suck for people who support uniforms for kids to know that they agree with Hitler on something.
I can’t grasp where the idea of dressing up kids to all look the same comes from. Are they covered up enough according to local taboos? Are they wearing clothes that will keep their body temperature comfortable? Then they’re fine. Caring beyond that is just wanting to go on a power trip.
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Nonsense. If my teenage son didn’t think I was a Nazi, I would consider myself a failure as a father. Even though he goes to an artsy-fartsy magnet school, I make him wear uniforms on weekends. Kids need something to push back against, like old-fashioned oppression.
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Oh, it wasn’t until I read your comment that I realized it’s NOT what was meant.
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That is pretty much the only thing wrong or creepy about this: teachers focusing on girls skirts and whether they’re “ladylike”. But other than that, there’s nothing wrong with this decision at all. It’s a school uniform, so everybody there has already accepted that the school gets to decide what you wear. The purpose of the school uniform is obviously not to get young girls to dress as sexily as possible; rather the opposite. So if the uniform doesn’t work, it makes sense to change it. Unisex uniforms make perfect sense in that regard. You could even argue that requiring boys and girls to wear different things would be sexist.
Really, the only thing off here is the word “ladylike”. Because if that’s your standard, that seems to require gender differentiates clothes rather than unisex clothes. Are trousers ladylike? Should boys be ladylike too? There’s just nowhere productive to go with that word.
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The purpose of a school uniform is not to make children less sexy. They are little children–sexiness should not come into it at all for the adult.
The problem here is interpreting childrens’ emulation of adult behavior as something that must be engaged with on adult terms.
Actually one motivation is to create a sense of shared identity. Students at one school in LA which had a lot of problems with gang colours went to a dress code (not an exact uniform, but dark shorts and white shirts for boys, similar for girls) reported that they felt a lot less pressure to compete with their clothing and brands.
At which point they competed on the brands of dark shorts, white shirts, shoes, socks, underwear, etc. Even if a school mandates every stitch of clothing a kid must wear, they’ll still find things to compete on if they want to compete with each other.
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Having worked in both UK and US schools I totally agree and saw it in action.
Wow. I was going to suggest “culotte” as an alternative; that’s what they called them back in the Pleistocene. A quick Google shows only sexy knickers, though. The kind of underpants that would work well with one of those excessively short skirts if you really want to put on a show, come to think.
