High School Uniform Benediction

St. Benedict’s is a new Catholic High School in Cambridge, Ontario. Here’s their website. Nice looking building, isn’t it?  [Ah… the website is gone.]

The students are nice-looking too. They all wear uniforms. The school promotes peace and healthy relationships. I applaud.

But I’ve never liked the idea of school uniforms. What’s the big deal? Why do some people have this compulsive need to tell people what they should be wearing?

I’ve heard the arguments in favor of school uniforms. Most of them essentially sound like this:

  • if we don’t tell students what to wear, girls will be sexually attractive and boys will want to have sex with them.
  • if we can’t tell students what to wear, how can we expect them to obey us when we’re telling them to do other things?
  • nobody will be fat any more, so everyone will be accepted by their peer group.

The other thing that annoys me about St. Benedict’s dress code is that they prescribe only clothes made by a certain manufacturer and sold by a certain vendor. The manufacturer is Denver Hayes and the vendor is Mark’s Work Warehouse.

What gives? It is understandable, if still somewhat bizarre, that a Catholic High School would tell its students what they may or may not wear to school, but why on earth should they require clothing made by a particular vendor?

Anybody with any common sense can see that the perfectly rational thing to do would be to specify the type of clothing– beige khaki pants, for example– and let students (or their parents) shop around for the best price.

Ah– but then little differences would be apparent. Five pockets instead of four. A slightly different shade of beige. No no no. Everyone must be EXACTLY alike.

Why do I have a suspicion that this deal was concocted by Mark’s Work Warehouse? Probably they claimed to be offering special pricing to the school if the school would guarantee that all students have to shop there. Probably there really isn’t any discount at all. Probably the items are now over-priced. Do you know of a single vendor that reduces his prices when he knows that he has no competition?

Hmmm. I also noticed that kilts are now banned. So much for the upside of school uniforms. There is a Catholic high school in Waterloo that requires kilts. I always found it somewhat ironic that the girls at this Catholic school were required to wear what looked to me like something we used to call “mini-skirts” when I was in high school.

What’s the point? I’ve heard uniforms defended, cleverly, as a way of reducing the peer pressure on kids. This is a “liberal” defense, to counter-act the impression that only militaristic conservatives want uniforms. (There is a link on St. Benedict’s web-site to a Catholic group that opposes the war in Iraq, so you can’t really accuse them of being “conservative”.)

Nobody has more expensive clothes than anybody else. Nobody has better brand names in their wardrobe. Our children will be judged by character instead of appearance. Is it true? Does it really happen? Are you telling me that there are no unpopular kids in schools with uniforms? That there is less bullying or cliquishness or self-righteousness? That people are more inclusive and fair and kind?

I don’t believe it. If anybody has a reliable study that shows that this really happens, I’d like to see it. And even if there was some reduction of bullying and harassment within the school, what about between schools? If uniforms are successful, won’t that mean, by definition, that kids from other schools, in different uniforms, become identified as outsiders?

In the meantime, I’ll continue to believe that good school spirit is the product of good schools, and good schools are the result of skilled, wise teachers, and wise leadership, but mostly the result of good kids.


St. Benedict students and staff are shy– I can’t find a single picture of anyone on the entire web-site.

How many rules do you need? Well, you start with the top and the bottom, shirt and skirt, and pants. Then boys start wearing jewelry. So you ban jewelry on boys. So someone says, “that’s sexist” because girls can wear earrings. So you allow earrings for boys. But some girls start wearing 2 or 3 earrings. So you ban all earrings on boys and girls. Then someone wears a nose-ring. You ban all jewelry. But what about our WWJD bracelets? Then the shoes– high heels, backless sandals, whatever. Then someone discovers that the rules don’t specify hair colour. For some reason, anal, militaristic apparatchiks get really upset with blue hair, so you have to add more rules. Then the length of the hair. Sooner or later, someone will shave their eyebrows or something, and you’ll have to ban that. And so it goes…

Yes, this sequence really does happen out there.


St. Benedict’s Dress Code:
Students are required to wear the charcoal gray uniform pants, the beige khaki pants, or blue or beige uniform shorts purchased through the school supplier. Only pants and shorts purchased from the school supplier will be acceptable;

At the bottom of the webpage is the motto:

St. Benedict CSS – A Celebration of People

… who all look alike.

Christian Home and School Magazine (March/April 2004) has a generally fawning article on school uniforms. A teacher claims that, “boys used to gather to comment on girls in the hallways, but now boys and girls are treating each other as equals…. that sexual edge is pretty much gone.”

Hmmm. I think I’ll remain skeptical. In a previous life, I used to be a boy and I can assure any teacher that nothing short of a Freightliner Express up the noggin is capable of preventing boys from thinking about the way girls look no matter what they are wearing.

To it’s credit, Christian Home and School gives some space to a Christian School in Calgary that decided against uniforms because they are associated with “elitist” schools in the city.

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