Before going on my yearly slow-tech hermitage, here is another one from our collaborator, Ratnakar Tripathy.   Never understood this thing about uniforms; but maybe now it almost makes more sense …

Uniformitarianism of school uniforms

If the tautology and the alliteration in the title here don’t bother you overmuch, you may not have ever reacted with revulsion at the sight of uniformed schoolchildren spilling out the school gates right into waiting buses – like packaged goods loaded at a warehouse! I always did. So did my wife, an educational consultant. And my daughter too who almost escaped uniforms till they caught up with her in junior college.

Yesterday however when my wife came back from a visit to a tribal village in Andhra Pradesh, she made a very unlikely suggestion. She said she wished the pre-school children she worked with were given uniforms by the corporate funder that runs the school. For a moment a major family consensus seemed to break down, that is, till she explained.

‘This is how it works out’, she said. Barely out of infancy, the children come from very poor families. They come to school clad in badly torn clothes that make it as good as nude. Just as it offends us to see someone go hungry, the unselfconscious raggedness and nudity is too disturbing to ignore or suppress. It is indeed possible here to go into the introspective gear and reflect on middle class hang-ups and hypocrisy. But the fact still remains – what is the point of literacy without a very fundamental sense of dignity that comes from being clothed?

Societies like India and Bangladesh with their teeming millions can easily take a cynical supply chain view of mass education. You go to a school with the latest and the most enlightened pedagogical ideas only to be faced with a hungry belly or a pair of shorts torn at precisely those points which we hide most jealously. So, feed and clothe the bodies before you even address ‘A B C D’ at the minds, is how you feel. No need to feed in this specific case, since the families seem to manage that though barely.

‘Why not distribute ordinary clothes, why uniforms?’ was the doubt I raised with some persistence.

‘It’s like this,’ she said and gave a series of arguments. We cannot see to it that the children remain well-clad outside the school hours anyway. If we distribute a variety of clothing we still have no way to let them do the choosing for themselves. There is also a good possibility that the clothes may be put away for special occasions like weddings. What a child ends up getting may also leave a bad feeling among other kids and their parents. Most of all, it is important for the child to wear a sense of dignity when face to face with the outside world. So why make fuss over petty worries like avoidable uniformity! After all the idea is to convince people that they are people and no less before they claim their rights.

The only convincing argument in favour of uniforms I had encountered in the past was – ‘it is easy to locate lost or wandering children’, which only applies to very small kids in a big city. But these ones were entirely new.

With some reluctance I gave in to the arguments. I was rid of one more minuscule but pointless dogma and felt the happy weightlessness it brings.