Codswallop.
What you mean is an INTELLIGENCE advantage.

More inteliigent parents (IMPORTANT QUALIFIER) tend, over large numbers, to have intelligent children.
Intelligent people tend to get better-paid jobs.
You CAN’T beat natural selection.

What you should do, and hasn’t been done, since 1968, is to enable poor, (even, shock, horror!) “working-class” intelligent children to get a decent education.
Because between the destruction of the Grammar schools by jealous spiteful idiots, and the removal of student grants, a poor child would now be unable to do as my father did.
His father died when he was 12, leaving my grandmother with two small sons to bring up, as a single mother, in 1923.
In those days, scholarships were very thin on the ground (disgracefully so) but my father got one, and by the time he retired, he was a Fellow of the ROyal Institute of Chemistry.
I don’t think you could do that now.
Her/his modern contemporaries would be crammed into a comprehensive, where academic excellence is frowned on, and even if he/she beat that, they would then be faced with the certainty of a £30 000 debt when he/she left university.

Grrr ……

It was a genuine question and it is not unfair to point out that the blogosphere, like journalism, is populated by people who are long on opinions about education but short on experience of what schools are actually like these days. How am I being deterministic? I am making the case for schools to have mechanisms whereby the teacher can establish him or herself as the administrator of rules. Given that an institution like a school has to have some form of dress-code anyway, uniforms are a legitimate way in which they can do this. I didn’t say uniform eliminates group identity, I said ‘helps ameliorate’. With all due respect to y’all, I think I’m in a better situation than any of you to judge whether this is the case or not.

I appreciate my experience is not typical because I have taught in some of the worst schools in Scotland’s worst-performing council but I can tell you that there are areas in the system that are approaching meltdown – and I’m not exaggerating this to make my point more interesting. We need every authority mechanism we can lay our hands on and uniform is one of these. I stand by and repeat my point: the idea that it is only eliminating fashion competition that is a rational defence of uniform shows a lack of imagination.

On a more general point, why are you insisting the only social function of dress-codes and uniforms are to instill prejudice? There is less formality in dress than there used to be but the worker today is more regulated than he or she used to be. You might think this is an unhappy coincidence – I happen to think they are related. Call it determinism if you will but I think the more subtle forms of social control have been de-legitimised so the ones that remain are blunter and ultimately more oppressive. But, hey – as long as people can express their individuality, man…

I didn’t like wearing school uniform, as I’m sure you’ve already worked out. The sentence you quoted, Shuggy, is very flippant. Of course I was glad to be out of it, but just for the sake of a more interesting article, one always likes to exaggerate.

I’d like to deal with your other benefits:

a) This argument, taken to its logical conclusion, is a justification for the barcoding of every citizen.

b) I’ve no doubt it’s useful in a situation like that.

c) You undermine your own point – it’s quite clear that uniform is not a necessary part in an authority relationship. It may help in situations where there is already a preconceived notion that uniform denotes authority – e.g. police uniform… but that was the crux of my argument, the metaphor for the whole basis of making pre-judgements purely on the basis of looks.

d) I think this point is a little naive if you think uniform eliminates conflict between subcultures in school. As Dunc has pointed out and I’ve already acknoweledged, there are a hell of a lot of ways to identify people as belonging to “your” group.

Like I said, my argument was a springboard. I was using the point of school uniform to illustrate how stereotypes on appearance are inculcated from a very early age, and that many of these actually have no bearing to reality – they simply happen because they always have done.

That’s unfair. Firstly, it’s hardly surprising that a pastime at the cusp of media technology and journalism (both dominated by people with a class advantage) should be disproportionately populated with grammar and private school boys (for it’s mnostly boys). That’s hardly Eddie’s fault, whether he’s in that category or not.

Secondly, what’s the salience here? I did go to a selective school oop north, but tend to agree completely with the points you just made about uniform. Your analysis is overly deterministic.

One could also add that you have an advantage in discussing the practical benefits of uniform, being a teacher n’all. Eddie, however, is doubtless rather closer to being a pupil than either of us, so his perspective is to be respected.

No, m’dear – some of us went to crap Glasgow comprehensives and have no such memory of such liberation. So you didn’t like wearing school uniform? Isn’t it time you got over this?

The only possible benefit they have is that they remove the idea of a fashion war happening in schools.

Other possibile benefits:

a) pupils leaving school kick a pupil from another school unconscious. How to identify the assailants? Uniform a bit of a give-away here.

b) Teacher works in school with a pupil population of 2000+. How to identify if some miscreant causing trouble is actually someone we’re paid to tolerate or someone else whose presence the police should be notified of? Again, uniform helpful here.

c) There’s a thin line between civilisation and a Lord of the Flies situation. Holding the line does not depend, as complete idiots like Blair seem to think, on the charisma of the teacher (‘everyone remembers a good teacher’) but on the recognition of the teacher as an administrator of the rules, always assuming a school has any – which is a big assumption these days. Uniform not essential here but helpful since it allows said teacher to establish him/herself as this.

d) Doesn’t just eliminate fashion war but helps ameliorate actual war. Given the freedom, pupils don’t ‘express themselves’ or any of that hippy crap; they express their belonging to other groups. Some of these groups are rather violent. Having a uniform can therefore pre-empt some of these problems.

Actually I’m a uniform agnostic – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – but it shows an extraordinary lack of imagination on your part if the only thing you can think about is how much you disliked it when you were at school and how the only plausible benefit is the elimination of kids competing in the wearing of designer clothes.

I have to say, since I started blogging, I’ve been struck by how many went to schools that were either private or grammar – and the more hard left they are, the more likely this is. Well, bully for them. You one of them, by any chance?

Uniforms – yes, what could be more sinister?

And of course I’m not proposing making uniform more restrictive. I can just see the problem being a lot worse without uniforms. I genuinely don’t know what the answer is.

All I know is that symptomatic within what is apparently quite an innocuous issue is the hidden prejudices engrained within a society: judging people purely on how they look, simply because that is the way we have been “taught”/socialised all our lives. If you like, it could be a metaphor for almost any kind of discrimination.

Now that I work from home my uniform is jeans/skirts and sloppy jumpers. Every single day. I quite miss my suits.

So wear a suit. No-one’s stopping you.

The only possible benefit they have is that they remove the idea of a fashion war happening in schools.

Except they don’t. Kids are very inventive when it comes to group identification, and are quite capable of coming up with alternatives that most adults won’t even notice. Unless you’re proposing something along the lines of a Victorian prison uniform, and the confiscation of all non-essential items (iPods, phones, etc), and the madatory use of school-issued items for the essential items… If the only means available to express group identity is whether you’ve got a Bic pen or a fancy pen, then that’s what they’ll use.