uniforms can be sexy, itchy, ugly, it doesn’t matter what else, but for the most part i agree w/bletch and the dr in part: bletch is right about all the military stuff, as i remember what my dad told me about his hitch-- matter-of-factly-- not perjoratively, but bletch is only wrong if he has a sweeping general opposition to uniforms. i can recall holding more than one job where the capricious standards for dress made me want to yell, “fuckit-- just give me a goddamned uniform!” a desperate cry, but neither impractical nor insincere…
and to combine the ideas of job dissatisfaction and drlucy’s point about who works here: has anyone ever found a central hardware hello my name is betty nametag in a gas station and worn it to central hardware just to see how many people you could annoy by being a really bad central hardware employee? s’fun!
Great, I go through all this effort to show why uniforms aren’t necessarily dehuminizing, and all that gets picked up is my lame joke. Next someone’s going to blame me for this thread.
Nope, I’m to blame for this thread.
The responders really seem to broaden my original point, which isn’t all bad because it sparks intelligent debate.
My previous, admittedly sarcastic post circumscribes the rather limited scope of my opinion.
Yes, certain uniforms do not dehumanize much, and maybe not at all. I was trying to say a nursing uniform endows the wearer with certain human qualities that he or she may or may not actually posess, but we assume they do because of the uniform, and the setting (i.e. a hospital). So here the uniform does the opposite of dehumanizing, “humanizing” if you will.
A military uniform (and a lot of military practices) tend to dehumanize the soldiers/wearers.
Does anybody really want physicians dressed as soldiers, that is, in the usual settings, such as a community hospital, and not in a field hospital, which is an obvious exception? I think not. But of course if our nation is at war, hell I think we should all wear uniforms, until the war is over. Then when the war ends we can all take them off at the same time.
But the extent to which you fine people have taken my opinion to argue against it is entertaining, and yet informative. And not necessarily a bad thing.
Bletchley, you really posted more than one idea in your post, just not clearly separated.
(1) Uniforms are inherently dehuminizing.
(2) The military likes dehuminizing soldiers.
(3) Doctors and nurses in civilian hospitals should not wear military uniforms.
Each of us has addressed some subset, but nobody has really clarified the different points.
(1) I think I addressed this already, and your last post you said some uniforms are not dehuminizing, so I think your point was really that military uniforms are dehuminizing. I don’t think this is a natural outcome of them being uniforms, but rather them being military.
(2) I will accede this point, to a degree. There is a certain need to get soldiers to forget the guy next to them is a person, to forget the enemy is a person, and function as an efficient order-taking, killing machine. Much of the structure of the military works this way, from the boot camp and hazing processes used to break down the individual and form a group loyalty, to the structure of officers vs. enlisted, to the use of titles and ranks and strict code of conduct to preclude “fraternization”. There are two processes here, not entirely independent. One is dehuminization, the other is deindividualization. (Hey, I have uniformed experience - I was in the Boy Scouts. 
)
(3) I agree. Unless you’re in a military hospital, there’s no reason to wear military uniforms.
Ursa, as much as I like you, and with all due respect - bull.
I went to a Catholic HS. Uniforms for 6 years. (Grades 9-12, and 2 years of OAC.) We weren’t dehumanized, regimented drones. Those were the sheep…er…students at the public schools whose apparel, and attitudes showed a lot less variation than among the uniformed students at my school.
This isn’t to say we weren’t happy to get out of them every once in a while - they weren’t all that comfortable, when the weather warmed up (They kept saying they’d change the dress code to allow shorts, but it never happened…:/). However they most certainly did not sap our individuality and creativity. If anything, it was the opposite - instead of allowing for the cop-out of ‘asserting our individuality’ by the superficial aspects of our clothing, they forced us to have real personalities.
Eschew Obfuscation
Tengu,
I bow to your personal experience with school uniforms. I’ve never had to deal with them (as a teacher, nor as a student.)
My problem is with “boot camp” style education where the school feels they must first break down a student before they can educate them. I believe there is a law pending in the Louisiana legislature that would allow schools to suspend any student who failed to address a teacher as “Sir” or “Ma’am”.