Should students wear uniforms?

By Kaydyn Massey, reporter

No, students should not wear uniforms.  Wearing uniforms would be bad for the students. We would feel like we are wearing prison clothes, considering some of us already think of school as jail. They don’t make bullying go away; how are they going to help? People say they make students grades improve, but I think not.  Not to mention that uniforms would deprive us of our creativity.  Also, some children may not be able to afford uniforms.

Wearing uniforms takes away our originality and expression.  As students we like to express our individuality in every way possible, considering we sometimes get overlooked because some adults think our opinions don’t matter.  Freshman Helena Ysasaga says, “When I was in Texas, they made us wear uniforms. The only way we could express ourselves is by wearing a sweater or jacket of your liking, wearing whatever shoes you wanted, and doing your hair, which the guys couldn’t do.”

Wearing uniforms would make us feel more like we are in prison.  I hear students complain about being in school all the time. School often gets compared to prison by students because we feel that we are not given a lot of freedom and taking away our choice in style and replacing it with uniforms would make us more miserable.

Life as a teenager is already hard with bullying we don’t need to be put down anymore by wearing uniforms. Some may argue that by wearing uniforms less bullying will go on, but they are wrong. A bully is a bully; they aren’t going to stop making fun of you just because you are wearing a uniform. They can get to you in a different way than just the type of clothes you wear. For example, you can get made fun of by what size you are, the amount of makeup you wear, whether your shoes are totally last year, or even by the way you style your hair. Bullying is in human nature, we all judge people by what they look like.

Some argue that by wearing school uniforms that students grades will improve, but how does wearing that same outfit as everyone else make your grades improve? This theory couldn’t be more wrong if they tried. The clothing you wear doesn’t improve your grade; it is how much effort you put into trying to improve it. They say that clothing you wear might distract students, but isn’t that point of the dress code, to keep students from wearing distracting clothing? If we already have rules about clothes then why do we need to wear uniforms? How does any of that affect our grades? No one knows, because it doesn’t.

Wearing uniforms doesn’t stop bullying, it doesn’t affect our grades, it makes students feel more miserable, and they take away any chance of showing who we are through our sense of style. Uniforms don’t sound too good now do they? We shouldn’t wear them and keep things the way they way they are.