Thailand’s never been a colony, but school uniforms are required here. You can always tell the poorer students, because their uniforms are old and worn and looking like rags. We don’t have children, so it’s not an issue for us, but I think the uniforms look dumb for the most part.
However, even university students are required to wear uniforms, and there’s some leeway as to how short or long the skirts are. Man, some of those girls really like to show their stuff. Mmm, baby. And many of the private high schools have girls’ uniforms that look straight out of a Japanese-manga erotic fantasy.
I haven’t been able to find any figures, and I am aware of the arguments for school uniforms in the developed world, but I keep hearing anecdotes about this problem when the subject is about trying to help the very poor in developing countries. These are people living on less than the equivalent of $1.00 per day, and if the choice is food for a week or school uniforms, then school uniforms are not a sensible requirement. However helpful to a child’s self-esteem it might be to have one, surely not getting to attend school at all is a worse option.
I listen to a lot of podcasts from the Carnegie Council, the Commonwealth Club, the National Press Club and other lectures available on iTunes. PRI’s ‘The Changing World’ did a program on the situation of people living in extreme poverty, and it was mentioned, but I have read mention of it before, either in UNICEF’s or Heifer Intl.'s publications. But I googled around and found some links. from Kenya
Well, it looks to me like the first of those links offers a potentially significant answer to much of your OP:
“Often, they can only be bought from one or two special shops, which means parents cannot shop around for bargains. The manufacture and retail of uniforms can also lead to corrupt deals between school heads and uniform makers or retailers.”
I’ve been following this until I had a chance to talk to my wife. In Mexico, pretty much all of the schools require uniforms. Unless you’re in some tiny rancho, though, there are multiple stores with multiple uniform suppliers, which supply uniforms of non-uniform quality. That is, they virtually look identical from outward appearances, but there are definite quality difference. I don’t know that children can tell the difference, unless you go to school all ratty. She seems to think that all public schools in her home state use the same uniform, which as a casual spectator I’d seem to agree with.
Private schools are another matter. They have their own uniforms, and they do have exclusive suppliers. If you want to go to that school, part of the price of admission is buying their uniforms. Additionally, private schools typically have different required uniforms depending on their function.
It might seem odd that I bring up private schools, but consider that in Mexico, if you’re middle class or above, you don’t send your kids to public school if there’s a private school available to you. Here in the USA, private schools are somewhat common, but certainly not ubiquitous. In Mexico – at least in middle class Mexico – they are ubiquitous.
In a public school, it’s generally safe to assume that everyone is your social equal. In a private school, though, it’s more like an American public school: you have the poor (i.e., the less [not lower] middle class), and progressive levels of the more well to do. While uniforms may try to be a social equalizer, that all goes out the door when the kids start comparing their different iPod models versus the cheap, flea-market Chinese knockoffs.
First of all, buying uniforms is cheaper because they aren’t as expensive as fashion clothing. Mass production, volume scale, etc.
Second of all, in many places, people don’t wear freshly laundered clothes every day. This may be easier to accomplish if no one can tell that your clothes today are looking the same as your clothes yesterday, while everyone else’s are different.
Wearing uniforms is not the same in a developing country as in the UK or US. In a poor country, the child may have 1-2 sets of the uniform, and 1-2 sets of other clothes. In an affluent country, the child may have 5 sets of the uniform plus accessories plus multiple sets of other clothes. Uniforms are used for many social reasons: To identify the children as students, to build group identification, and to decrease economic distinctions (even though everyone knows whose family has what anyway).
However, often the school leaders cut a corrupt deal with some local merchant to be the exclusive supplier of these uniforms. Then of course, as a monopoly, they can get away with charging whatever they want for the uniforms, and the students are stuck paying that. Generally, there is some deal whereby the school (or school leaders) get a kickback from the deal.
This was the way it worked 40 years ago in rural Minnesota for Boy Scout uniforms. There was only one store in town that sold the official uniforms, and they charged very high prices for them. When some mothers tried to start an exchange service for out-grown scout uniforms, the troop leaders forbid them from doing that, and threatened to expel their kids from Boy Scouts. They said that using hand-me-down uniforms was ‘unsanitary’ – which was ridiculous; our mothers were experts with their washing machines, and would have had these uniforms quite clean.
As an Eagle Scout, don’t get me started on the high prices and generally shabby quality I’ve observed with Boy Scouts of America-branded clothing and equipment. To make things worse, the Girl Scouts will always have us beat when it comes to selling junk food for fund raisers (Girl Scout Cookies are SO much better than Trail’s End Popcorn, and our troop was a major customer for those things whenever the girl scouts started selling them).
