School uniforms?! - Column

National Review, Feb 26, 1996 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

One commentator dealt bravely with the seven general categories of national problems addressed by President Clinton and finished his appraisal with the sentence, "Why on earth does the leader of the free world have to concern himself with school uniforms?"

Well now, there are those who found that the most novel and potentially the most resonant sentence in the President's address. Flash ahead ten years, close your eyes, answer the question: "What was the highlight of President Clinton's State of the Union speech in 1996?" Right, the answer will be: Oh, that's the speech in which he came out for school uniforms. . . . To say that was the "highlight" of the speech is of course to take liberties, consigning all else he said to generic political thought. The President declared in favor of health care, law and order, unity, growth, and husbandry. So does every candidate running for President. It was the school-uniform bit that caught the attention of the unwary, who asked first, What does Mr. Clinton know about school uniforms? and asked second, How is it that he intuits their importance?

Not long ago a public-school teacher in New York City wrote to the Wall Street Journal a letter bristling with authenticity, relating that the foremost problem in the city's schools was: discipline. In the absence of it, she complained, practically nothing else is possible. What has been called the "hijacker's leverage" is operative here. Just as one terrorist can dictate the movements of a super-jet carrying five hundred passengers, so one unruly student can, for as long as he is able to keep it up, affect the climate of a schoolroom. In the late Sixties, one senior at Harvard appeared at the office of the president hours before the Commencement ceremony demanding that he be scheduled as a speaker during the ceremony. If not, he informed the stunned president, the ceremony would not proceed. A half-dozen noisy protestors, even in an assembly of two thousand, can make solemn processions impossible; as also, studious classrooms.

The head of Cardinal Hayes High School in New York made a point of it some years ago. That school -- formally a diocesan school although many of its students are of other faiths, 85 per cent of them minorities -- has arresting academic attainments; 85 per cent of its graduates go on to college, compared with less than 15 per cent in comparable public schools made up of identically endowed students. It is very important, the principal told his visitor, to insist on a school uniform.

Why? one naturally wondered. Because, he said, the symbol irradiates several things. The first is that the student is a member of a regulated community. When you are in uniform, your dress bespeaks hierarchy. The symbol is very important. At Cardinal Hayes the students are simply not expected to be late in arriving at school, and punctuality is accepted as a part of the system: related, in a way, to the requirement that the students wear their simple grey jackets and pants, a shirt and a tie. On the question of disorder in the classrooms it is as simple as that there is no disorder in the classrooms. Defenders of the antinomian behavior of so many public-school students confide to you that the reason for the success of the private schools is that they simply expel anyone who is in any way nonconformist. But such chaos-defenders run into statistics: 2 per cent of the students at Cardinal Hayes are expelled.

The maintenance of order, the minor conformity that issues from the wearing of identical uniforms, is always a latent problem because the schools deal with boys and girls who are going through their unruly period in life. The sociologist who some time ago remarked that a single broken and unrepaired window is an invitation to corollary shambles gave us all an epiphany. Of course it is true! we realize. Student unruliness is met in different seasons in different ways. At Eton in the 1830s the students outnumbered faculty by about 100 to 1, and the notorious Doctor Keate attempted to solve his problem by flogging a dozen students every day. We shrink from such measures, but ought to welcome civilized substitutes, and the school uniform is the beginning of wisdom in this field, and we say hurrah to the President for coming upon that insight.