Dress standards and the quest for UNIFORMITY

This is a false issue. There has always been a rule on the books requiring Thammasat students to wear their uniforms, but it has never been enforced. I understand that certain faculties require their students to wear the uniform when sitting for examinations. But, in general, students are free to wear whatever they like.

The controversy does raise the question of whether high-school and university students should be required to wear uniforms at all. In that context, the following tale may prove instructive. 

Back in the hallowed year of 1964, I was a young high-school teacher in my first year at Taipei American School (TAS). The Age of The Beatles was in full flower. Teenage boys wanted to wear their hair long; teenage girls wanted to wear miniskirts. TAS didn’t make its students wear uniforms, but it did have a dress code that (among other things) prohibited boys from wearing long hair and girls from wearing miniskirts. 

What’s wrong with long hair and miniskirts? The official answer was that they were distracting. Students were supposed to be focusing on their studies. They couldn’t do that if the boys were ogling the girls’ bare thighs and the girls were admiring the boys’ flowing locks. The bare-thigh factor, too, tended to divert the attention of young male maths teachers from the proper teaching of quadratic equations.   

But the school administration did not want to impose a dress code. They knew that it would turn their teachers into cops. That would create a hostile relationship between teachers and students that would poison the educational process. 

In those days, TAS had a high percentage of students from American military families. The parents demanded a dress code. Some of them couldn’t control their children, so they wanted the school to do it for them. There was a famous anecdote about a US Army colonel who commanded a vast number of troops but couldn’t make his own son get a haircut. So the administration yielded, the dress code was imposed, and the teachers were asked to enforce it.

As a young first-year teacher, I was a proper little fascist, all aflame with zeal to enforce the principles of righteousness and propriety mandated by the school authorities. As a result, I ended up spending more time and energy monitoring the students’ appearance than I spent working on my lesson plans. I found myself barking “Tuck that shirttail in!” at students on campus so often that I had to check myself from yelling the same thing at innocent Taiwanese civilians downtown.

Eventually the irrationality and fruitlessness of this endeavour affected my growing brain, and I gave it up. If the administration wanted to enforce the dress code, let them do it. I had signed up to be a teacher, not a cop.

Fast-forward to 1966, when I was teaching at Singapore American School (SAS). There the students all wore uniforms. This was something new. It created a pleasant and orderly atmosphere in the classroom, and there were none of the distractions posed by voluptuous young ladies with tight, see-through blouses or boys wearing T-shirts inscribed “Bullshirt”. 

SAS had a Free Dress Day every month just to allow the students to let off steam. On those occasions the miniskirts, the see-through blouses and the bare midriffs came out in all their glory. The young male teachers reeled from their classrooms gasping incoherently, the boys stumbled from one classroom to another in a coma of lust, and if any learning occurred, you had to look very hard to find it. This convinced me of the value of uniforms. 

In 1986 I descended upon these sacred shores and secured a teaching job at Thammasat University itself. Thammasat students wore uniforms; but because they were not compulsory in practice, they were not an issue. That struck me as an ideal state of affairs, especially since Thammasat students were polite and obliging. They followed the rules as a matter of upbringing and propriety; they didn’t push the limits, as some of the American and British students had done at TAS and SAS.

I taught at Thammasat for 15 very pleasant and fulfilling years, and recall only one incident that gave me pause. One young lady came to class (obviously not in uniform) wearing a T-shirt that said “Stop staring at my tits”. Thinking that this might be a one-time aberration, I let it pass. But no. She wore the same T-shirt a second time, and then a third.

By now I had mellowed into the belief that people have a right to wear anything they choose, so long as it is not egregiously offensive. But I wondered if she knew what the slogan meant. If she didn’t, she might want to rethink her choice of T-shirt. 

So on the fourth occasion, I gently asked her to come up to the desk after class. “Miss Supatra, do you know what the slogan on your T-shirt means?”

She blushed, and said, “Yes, but I like it.”

 “That’s okay,” I assured her. “I just wanted to make sure you understood what it means.” 

Having seen both sides of the story, my current feeling is that it is easier to teach, and easier for students to learn, in an environment with the fewest possible distractions. Uniforms help to provide such an environment. They also fulfill a need in Thai society by providing the appearance of order and discipline with none of the bothersome substance. And the principle of freedom of choice, which Thammasat University has always championed, makes the absence of heavy-handed enforcement a very wise policy indeed. 

 

Ye Olde Curmudgeon is an old curmudgeon who used to teach at Thammasat University and never wears a uniform.