School Uniforms - the "Great Equalizer"

Do School Dress Codes Really Serve a Purpose?

I'll start off by coming clean, so to speak. I spent the first twelve years of my formal education attending schools that mandated uniforms. It wasn't so bad at St. Anthony's School; we were young, innocent and frankly not bright enough to realize, at the time, that not everyone else in the world had to wear the same outfit every single day. It really wasn't until seventh grade that a lot of us girl had the same, collective light bulb go off in our parochial brains: these uniforms were not only really ugly, but also did nothing to display our rapidly blooming girlish charms. (Which, frankly, was the intention. The good nuns of the Order of St. Francis were not stupid. When they wore their 'uniforms', they looked strangely romantic in them, especially the young, beautiful blue-eyed ones directly over from Ireland. They also knew that adolescent girls were apparently incapable of knowing how to dress as the Lord would have us dress - hence, uniforms.) Brown jumpers paired with either short-sleeved or long-sleeved blouses, depending upon the weather, our feet firmly planted on the ground in shapeless brown loafers. Even the prettiest of girls looked strangely lackluster in that uniform.