The use of uniforms in both public and private schools would alleviate many problems in schools and would end up saving parents quite a bit of money throughout the course of a school year. Thus, making uniforms mandatory for all students is a good idea, at least to experiment with. While this would be a restrictive and quite likely, very unpopular movement in the eyes of students, it is quite possible that once the policy of uniforms became a regular and expected practice, there would not be as much thought given to or as much anger about it.
One of the most potent arguments for requiring uniforms in all public schools is that parents would be able to save a great deal of money on clothing for their teenagers. Those living under the roof of their parents often have little concept of the growing cost of the outfit for school and see things more in terms of what they want rather than what is actually needed. Although it is true that forcing a standard uniform reduces a child’s freedom of expression on the outside, it solves the huge issue of constant cost (not to mention parent and child fights over what is bought and worn) and can, once accepted and standardized, become a resource for reducing a strain on a family’s budget.
As it stands now, there are several problems that stem from students and their free choice of clothing and many schools have wasted precious time crafting and re-crafting their dress codes to alleviate one problem after another. Even though it might not be a popular revision to the free choices many public schools offer their students, it might improve behavior and even academic performance. Revealing clothing, jealousy about what someone else is wearing (which has even lead to violence in the past) and the feelings of inadequacy experienced by poorer students are all issues faced by schools that offer free choice of clothing.
As a further consideration of how clothing influences certain aspects of public schools, gangs in schools who rely on colors to identify one another at larger schools would no longer be a factor. Instead of spending time during school worrying about these issues revolving around clothing choices, with uniforms, students would be more likely to focus on their schoolwork instead of these issues. While gangs are not a significant problem at all schools, it is important to recognize that groups of kids that identify one another based on how they dress (gothic, punk, etc) are going to be forced to look past how one dresses to determine who their friends will be (because we all know that kids who dress alike hang out together, at least for the most part) and choose their friends based on a more rigorous, less shallow set of criteria.
Furthermore, the staff at schools would waste far less time on penalizing dress code violations and would have a much simpler policy that would be easy to follow and enforce. In addition to these positive aspects of regulating what young people wear to school, parents would save a lot of money since they would no longer be under pressure from their children to buy them the “right” clothes so they fit in. In short, although it will be difficult to implement, it is a good move to regulate what young people wear to school.
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