However, I think conflating people's judgement of a school based on its ethnic diversity with the judgement people make based on uniform is unhelpful.
It is exactly the same thing, Lurker. You insist uniforms help the public form an opinion of a school and therefore no power in the land will change the fact of uniform. Uniform itself exists because in the mind of the public, civilian clothes for schoolchildren means 'not a selective/public school'. As long as uniform exists, it will pander to the worst prejudices of British society.
Just as there are people who see a lot of makeup (an 'unsubtle' look), wild hair colour and sharpie brows on girls and think 'slappers', there are people who see a lot of 'ethnic diversity' and form a negative opinion. The public's right to judge schools based on what is visible on the surface is not challenged when people are willing to play the game and support rules against looking like a slapper or the equivalent.
When a country insists on the herd mentality wrt clothing and publicly polices the clothing of young people it has only itself to blame when the same young people start to turn on each other and bully those perceived to be bucking trends, whether because of poverty or because some people can't be arsed keeping up.
By contrast, as many posters here have noted, the experience of children and teens in systems where there is no uniform is that conformity is not the be all and end all, in fact clothing itself and hairstyles, and all the rest of it the brands, etc are not central to the lives of teenagers or children. This is clearly hard to imagine.
You post about schools encouraging individuality, most U.K schools do too, but does individuality have to about your image, about what you wear? I am not sure I posted about individuality, but heyho. I posted about individual responsibility though. This means learning to live with yourself and with others, sharing space respectfully, taking personal responsibility for how you treat others and for your own work. You can accomplish this in a school where this is the focus, as opposed to a school where teachers are busy maintaining a school's public image no matter what the cost to the students.
"Subtle" is intended to discourage the wearing of excessive make up and the subsequent distractions it causes from learning in school. You have said before " my children's school" but many, many teachers would tell you the distractions that applying make up in class, or the need to stop between lessons in order to top it up cause. It also causes distractions because SOME parents police this themselves, where as others do not, this can lead to exchanges of it in school while one girl applies stuff she isn't allowed to at home. Again causing distractions from the task in hand, much in the way mobile phones do too.
Where is the data to support the assertion about alleged constant distraction caused by makeup?
Same goes for phones?
You propose essentially that each school should be a miniature nanny state where the environment must be carefully controlled, fake equality imposed, value judgements about appearance carved in stone thus preventing teenagers from being responsible for their own priorities, and their own behaviour as if this was a good thing that serves an educational purpose. God forbid that children should learn that everyone is an individual and different and learn to deal with that, or learn to set their own goals and stick to them despite whatever distractions there may be.
God forbid that the British public should understand and admit to itself that no amount of wearing blazers by teenagers from huge sections of society will render them upwardly mobile. Everyone wants to play the game of pretence. Well actually about half want to play the game, if this thread is anything to go by. lol at 'overwhelming majority'..
The problem with rules is that while the vast majority of students would make sensible decisions, others need guidance within it
This is not the way to prepare anyone for the real world of work and adult responsibility though, is it? In order to prepare children for the world of freedom, you surely allow them freedom in an area where choice is not going to hurt anyone, and build up other freedoms gradually. So you go from never wearing uniform to having a driver's licence at 16 and then a part time job (something a huge number of American students do), to moving away to university at 18 (more part time jobs) and possibly never living at home again.
Essentially your reasons for uniform boil down to:
- Schools are factories where teachers must produce results, and therefore students must not be distracted by anything because the teachers' reputation is at stake. So uniforms are there ultimately for the sake of the teachers.
- Uniforms and the appearance of the students pander to the ignorance and prejudices of the public, whose perception of a school leads to higher enrollment, which in turn leads to funding, with the opposite holding true too, and all of this is fine.