I am not in form, I am in content

Over the years of my studies, I changed more than fifteen schools. Partly due to the constant moving of my parents, but about half of them simply kicked me out. Sometimes quietly, sometimes not so much. Perhaps the most noisy was the expulsion from the sixteenth school, where the specialized philological class was supervised by the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. And one of the main reasons for the scandal then was an article I wrote for the school wall newspaper, which, however, I myself published, being, moreover, practically its only author. The article was dedicated to school uniforms.

And now, after more than forty years, I again sit down to write on the same topic. I admit that I feel a little stupid about this. However, the past years were not entirely in vain. And if then, as an ardent and spontaneous young man, I wrote a huge, almost monumental study that the compulsory and forced wearing of a single uniform for schoolchildren throughout the country is outright stupidity and disgusting, now my ardor and spontaneity have already diminished. Therefore, I will not cite all the countless arguments that I used in the wall newspaper, although I remember them almost by heart, but I will limit myself to just a few comments of a purely personal nature.

Starting from the fifth grade, I did everything possible to avoid wearing this same uniform. Even to the point of malicious damage to uniforms, even when they were essentially the only ones left, since we lived, of course, not “for”, but clearly on the brink of poverty. Tears welled up, but I carefully burned a hole in my pants as large as possible with an iron. And from the seventh grade I even stopped doing this. I just categorically stopped putting on my uniform, that’s all. Somehow, you know, I finished school. I admit, it was not without difficulty, but I received the certificate.

Naturally, you can force any person to do anything. Each nail has its own impact force that can drive it somewhere. Or break it. When I was ten, I spent about a year in a boarding school. Several thousand kilometers from home. They stripped me naked, gave me everything I owned, down to my underpants, and gave my things to my mother, who took them away. And out of hopelessness, naturally, all that time I wore several types of uniform. True, he tried to create some confusion there, mixing jackets for different purposes, but in a specialized closed institution, attempts at rebellion were suppressed harshly and quite successfully.

But in a world that was even a little more open, they couldn’t cope with me. And my children didn’t wear uniforms. Fortunately, their school years occurred in an era when this problem turned out to be irrelevant. Otherwise, I would have done everything possible to ensure that this problem was not relevant for my children anyway. And I have no doubt that I would have succeeded.

But everything comes back, and with horror I am forced to hear the same stupid argument. They say that the uniform disciplines and smoothes out social inequality. I'm too lazy to argue with this nonsense.

For purely technical, practical, and sometimes economic reasons, uniforms are necessary in certain situations for certain groups of people. And each time it performs very specific functions, from the ability to distinguish friendly soldiers from enemy soldiers on the battlefield, to protecting the body during special high-risk work. But in the entire history of its existence, nowhere has it ever disciplined anyone or smoothed out social differences. And often quite the opposite. There have never been much fewer hooligans, and even much more serious criminals, among those wearing various kinds of uniforms than among those who dress casually. And as for signs of any distinction, including social ones, here usually the strictest uniform gives a hundred points ahead to every sweater and jeans.

I feel with horror that I am involuntarily drawn into the argument again, and I really don’t want to do this, so I’ll stop abruptly, and I’ll only mention a new shade that has appeared exclusively recently, when it has become fashionable for us to refer to “their experience.” So Mikhail Weller just spoke very smartly in his usual manner:

“No, this is equalization in a good sense. Look, if we take all even the most expensive, most privileged British, American, French, Swiss schools, they go there in uniform! And there, if their parents pay a fee, they are all, one way or another otherwise, they are equal, and not the one who has the richest dad is more important. I believe, I repeat, that this is absolutely fair and normal.”

That is, people don’t even understand what they are talking about when they compare the double-breasted “strawberries” of Western elite nurseries with the mandatory uniform school uniform throughout the country. What does all this mean? Yes, absolutely nothing. You can’t even draw a moral about human stupidity going around in circles. It’s just inevitable, since people try to find simple answers to not only complex, but sometimes completely unsolvable, and even fundamentally not requiring a solution questions. And the number of these simple recipes is quite limited. So they pull the same thing out of the closet from time to time.

Are morals falling, is there no social justice? And instead of thinking about whether these very morals, which are constantly falling, are really necessary, as long as humanity has existed, and whether this also happens in nature and whether so-called social justice is actually needed in nature - instead of all this, they start playing bagpipes again about school uniforms. Well, it’s very, as it’s fashionable to say these days, creative.

The form can have a beneficial effect only in one single case. If it is put on voluntarily. In any other case, it inevitably turns into the same stupidity and disgusting. I was sure of this as a teenager, and I have no doubt now. And you decide what to wear for you and your children. I'm no longer interested in this.

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