[Step One] School Uniforms!

Step One:  Choose your topic at idebate.org by going to the "Debatabase" section. Choose a topic that interests you and will be easy enough for you to write personally.  You are allowed to use "I" in this essay, and hopefully you can find a motion that you have some experience with. 

[The house should ban school uniforms.]

Whenever you walk by the streets near middle schools or high schools in Korea or Japan, you can easily find girls in a very short school uniform skirts or boys in a pair of tightened jeans. Students try to accentuate their specialty or to simply show some rebel to this whole education system of conformity by deforming their school uniforms. One of the most common reasons of why students in Korea get “penalty points” at school is because they have violated the “dress code” of wearing school uniforms. Then what is the point of wearing the same school uniforms every day? The natural consequence of students not wanting to be the same as others around them is worsening the relationship between students and teachers.

What is the fundamental reason for wearing the same uniforms in the first place? In Korea, wearing uniforms is just one natural rule of attending schools. Schools have never told us why. Whenever we wonder why, all they tell us is because it has been that way for a long time. Then how long is that long time? Korean schools have been requiring school uniforms since the Japanese colonial era, so the origin is from the Japanese schools. How about the other countries? Well, I don’t know yet. But I’m pretty sure all they could ever give as a reason for wearing school uniforms is that it helps unity of students attending the same school.

For my school, we have one special reason for wearing school uniform: to keep the tradition of “Korean minjok”. To keep the Korean destiny, we are forced to wear Hanbok every single day. Wearing Hanbok uniform is good for it being special compared to other high schools. But that statement becomes true because there is a precondition that all Korean high schools require school uniforms. If there weren’t, why would it be that happy? I also have a lot of things to say about keeping tradition by wearing traditional clothes all the time, but I won’t for now since it’s a little bit off-topic.

School uniforms also become a big financial burden for a lot of parents in the middle or lower class. My middle school uniforms cost about $700 in average, in order to buy both ones for summer and winter. Seven hundred dollars is such a big deal for normal people, considering they would have to buy more each time their children grow. There are some schools that have even more expensive uniforms such as my high school. My parents spent more than $2000 in the beginning of the semester, just for the purchase of school uniforms. If the schools cannot give us apparent reasons for wearing uniforms, the cost of them can never be justified at all.