Nowhere in the long history of education can you find evidence to say that a school uniform is a factor in learning. Yet, a lot of people today cannot imagine a school without a uniform. When they think about a school, including their own, they think about the uniform that makes its children distinct from the children of other schools. Especially on festive occasions when grand events bring all the schools of a city together, people find something deeply edifying in the spectacle of children marching or displaying their smartness wearing a distinct uniform. The public fascination with such spectacles, and the history of the school uniform, point to the single most important role that a school uniform plays: it helps in the regimentation of the young. Uniformly dressed children constitute one of the two archetypal metaphors of schooling. One is that of a garden where different flowers bloom; the other is of an army of little soldiers marching together.
A history, social impact
If you divide the world into countries that have a compulsory uniform in their schools and countries that do not, the history starts to reveal itself. Systems of education that evolved under colonial rulers of different types generally favour strict enforcement of the school uniform. That includes us.
