Even assuming they were referring to the problems preteens face avoiding peer pressure, this is a bad idea. At what age to people begin to learn to resist peer pressure? The older the child is, the higher the stakes. Perhaps in middle school the stakes are designer shoes. (And, even though every article on uniforms refers to these shoes, I never see dress codes refer to them. Uniforms don’t forbid designer shoes.) In high school, it might be drugs or sex. Wouldn’t you rather your child practice resisting peer pressure by turning down designer shoes than by being faced with pressure to have sex…when she has no experience saying no? There is exactly one way to learn to effectively resist peer pressure and that is by resisting it.
At any rate, uniforms do not do away with peer pressure. The real pressure doesn’t come from clothes, as any teen can tell you. If a child’s values involve expensive clothes, this is an issue for parents to work out. My children might have liked expensive clothing too, but they were trained by their parents. “Here is how much money you have for clothing. You can buy one expensive item or lots of inexpensive one. Uniforms are for lazy parents. It is not the job of the school to teach children about clothing. They are having enough trouble teaching them about reading and math.
5. Helping students concentrate on their school work. This is nonsense. They simply don’t give teens enough credit. If a teen is flaky enough to spend her entire class time worrying about wardrobe, she won’t be a good student anyway. That year we lived with uniforms, the principal was explaining this very issue to me one day. I glanced down at a girl working at a table next to me. Her notebook was decorated with pictures of clothing ads, and she was drawing clothes around the edge of her paper. She was wearing a uniform, but clothes were her obsession, and the uniform didn’t change that.
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