[Step Three]-1 Outline

*The house should ban school uniforms. There are no justifiable reasons for schools to force students to wear uniforms.

1.    It is expensive!

-The average of the school uniforms is about $250 per one pair around the world. The total range would be about $200~$1000. How can everyone support this? Isn’t this too much of a financial burden for middle/lower class parents? They would even have to buy more and more whenever their children grow.

-Even if there is a financial aid from the government, they still have to pay. The line between whom to support and whom not to, is not certain. Even those who are not as poor to get financial aid might feel it too expensive.

-We still need other clothes even if we already have school uniform to wear. Uniforms are just for school. It’s not like we’re going to wear school uniforms 24/7. School normally ends at 3~4 p.m. Parents would have to pay for both school uniforms and other clothes whereas they would have had to pay only for normal clothes if there were no school uniforms.

2. Individuality/ creativity should be encouraged

-Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” Schools are keeping children from developing their own creativity and expressing their individuality by making them wear the same clothes.

-There are other programs for creativity? They are unnecessary if the schools are not allowing children to express their creativity from the most basic thing like what to wear. Clothes are the fundamental ways of showing themselves.

3. (Counter-argument) Sense of equality

-If there is no school uniform, poor kids would tend to wear cheaper clothes and that can be a reason for being bullied.

à Is conformity the only way of preventing bullies? Schools should try to teach children that everyone is different. That’s what education is. Making everyone look the same is only a short term solution; there are other factors of bullying, too. Learning conformity at school is what makes children turn discriminative towards people who are only a little bit different from them. They should try to teach the difference between people and how they all should be respected. That is what the education is, in long term. If school uniforms are important in a way of conformity, the enforcement for wearing them cannot be justified.

Link to the database website!

[Step Two]

The school uniform should be banned primarily because it is too expensive considering the use of them. The average of the school uniforms is about $250 per one pair around the world. The total range would be about $200~$1000. This would be a big financial burden for middle or lower class parents. They would even have to buy more and more whenever their children grow. Even if there is a financial aid from the government, most of them would still have to pay. The line between whom to support and whom not to, is not certain. Even those who are not as poor to get financial aid might feel it too expensive. Although there are school uniforms, students still need other clothes even if we already have school uniform to wear. Uniforms are just for school. It’s not like we’re going to wear school uniforms for the whole day. School normally ends at 3~4 p.m. Parents would have to pay for both school uniforms and other clothes whereas they would have had to pay only for normal clothes if there were no school uniforms.

Children should be able to express their creativity freely. Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” Schools are keeping children from developing their own creativity and expressing their individuality by making them wear the same clothes. Some say there are other programs for creativity. But, those programs are unnecessary if the schools are not allowing children to express their creativity from the most basic thing like what to wear. Clothes are the fundamental ways of showing themselves.

Some say that if there is no school uniform, poor kids would tend to wear cheaper clothes and that can be a reason for being bullied. Conformity is not the only solution to the bullying problems. Schools should try to teach children that everyone is different and that each one should be respected equally. That’s what education is. Making everyone look the same is only a short term solution; there are other factors of bullying, too. Learning conformity at school is what makes children turn discriminative towards people who are only a little bit different from them. They should try to teach the difference between people and how they all should be respected. That is what the education is, in long term. If school uniforms are important in a way of conformity, the enforcement for wearing them cannot be justified.

[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.