School uniforms . . . .

Back in India during my school years, we always wore uniforms to schools and there were special occasions when we were allowed clothes other than uniforms. As much as the uniforms were a great idea for it showed "equality" among students (not mine, some teacher in my high school days had portrayed it) . On the contrary, parents had their ways of showing their affordability even in the plain bland uniforms and of course it didn't bother us kids at all.

Looking back the school uniforms had both strengths and weaknesses

• It always was a night mare right before the end of summer and a mad rush to the special stores selling school uniforms or rush to our favorite tailors to get them stitched right before the school started.
• If by any chance you made a mess of that uniform, you essentially had nothing to wear to the school next day (who would keep multiple school uniforms)
• It made discrimination much easier than you can imagine. For ex: between 2 kids one with a random school uniform and another with "good" school uniform any misbehavior the "good" school uniform attracted harsher criticisms and if needed punishment or viceversa
• When we have multiple schools within walking distances of each other, for teachers they served the purpose of identifying our kids and other kids
• It did serve as an economy booster and kept the tailors and cloth merchants/makers in business
• The school density at some point became so high in Bangalore that the schools were finding it hard to differentiate their uniforms from others and were playing all sort of tricks to keep it that way (like adding a tie, changing shoe color, making the shirt to a tad different shade)

One can argue, the economics of the day demanded school uniforms for it was easier on parents pockets. I argue differently it wasn't the economics but the ability to differentiate between schools is what drove the school uniforms existence and the reason they are still thriving in urban India.

Now the question what prompted this post? Today was second round of  Lemonade play at school and for that all kids from kindergarten were dressed up in blue and white while the teachers were in blue and black. So, Kiker elementary had some uniform for kindergartners today :) .