No, seriously exactly what it's not. I grew up never knowing, that the shorts school uniforms thing existed, because in South Wales it did not. My mother also thought that any question of it had ended when the mid-century boys' breeches era ended. The cruelty includes that you can know they exist and would have suited you and you did not get them !! and before the web you could discover that only when grown up after being completely oblivious to it all your childhood. That's why I never asked to go to a school with that uniform, in all innocence I couldn't because my wildest dreams never had cause to imagine they existed.
I, a devoted year rounder for over 30 years with deep identity feelings about it and success in getting it recognised as an autistic need in my work (gardener). I was from age 8 1/2 a victim of a reckless ill-resourced short-lived right wing private school militantly in favour of advance streaming for giftedness, it was full of future promises but got consistently bad results as it was fearsomely shouty and bad tempered and fanatical for homework, and that does not work. It ended up in the abuse of giving me a terrifying pressure breakdown at 14, and blew its propaganda by it so that I have the satisfaction of knowing I was a key cause of its discredited decline to closure. So that was its nature, and it's businesslike gloom included that it did not allow shorts at all above the first primary year after infants class, which on average steaming was age 8
.
At least as it allowed girls thick tights it was not encouraging blatant gender difference over legs but was completely anti legs. We were not allowed to go home in PE kit, even though PE was at a bussed-to site 2 miles from school, there were no showers there, and changing us could hold up bussing us back to connect with the main school buses and hold up everyone. If there had not been the too hasty rejection if cub scouts for my dislike of football, I could have been awake to my shorts identity in time to stop me ever believing in it agreeing to go to that catastrophic school.
Think how lifelong traumatic it is to learn about experiences it is to learn about experiences of the shorts uniforms, shocking not to have been stopped as cruelty but that would have been nice and right for me, while I instead got this.
Learn too from how we have all been left to perceived our own completely different bubbles and think they are the national picture. TV current affairs never points out their existence, as if too incredible, even when it debates uniform, this failed to inform me of them in my oblivious childhood. For learning's sake I really wish to know where SheGotACamouflagedFace's experience is located. It's the second post I've seen on here recently saying that. Yet other posts on the subject, in various places, include: "I've never heard of a school not allowing trousers before". "Didn't think they still existed " "I am horrified to discover that this cruel and poncy tradition still exists". "It's not that usual nowadays " ! In Edinburgh where I live now, the posh private schools make it prominent around town but certainly not the dominant culture re state schools, and adults react to my shorts quite as if the private schools don't exist around them in plain sight. In childhood we never learned of them from a mum's schoolfriend family in coastal Dorset, so it seems as absent there as in South Wales.