Should school uniforms go?

A suggestion by the MUT in its pre-election document for political parties to consider abolishing school uniforms has sparked quite a discussion on the online media, especially on timesofmalta.com.

At the beginning of this scholastic year, school uniforms were already on the agenda, and the parliamentary Social Affairs committee issued its recommendations in February this year, basically recommending simplicity and less frequent changes in uniform design, and no exclusive contracts with one supplier. The Education Ministry had agreed with these proposals and said that most of them were already being implemented.

I am of the opinion that uniforms should stay. First of all, the argument that uniforms are expensive and removing them would ease the expenses off parents' pockets does not hold water. On the contrary, kids would require more clothes, apart from the competitive element of what clothes to wear, risking a higher element of bullying on kids coming from poorer families especially in secondary school. A uniform also provides a more visible sense of equal footing, where a student is assessed in class only on his academic abilities, in the pitch on his physical and athletic abilities, in the art-room on his creativity, in the hall on his performing ability...and never on his attire.

Uniforms also give students a sense of belonging to the school they are attending, and make it more difficult for them to venture outside school-grounds, as the uniform would be easily identifiable.

Uniforms therefore make life easier for parents, educators, and students. If the only difficulty is their price, it can be solved with the most obvious solution which keeps prices down: free up the market, remove exclusivity and monopolies, and increase competition. Thankfully, that's what the Social Affairs committee is proposing and that's what state schools have started to implement.