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Ngoc Nguyen
Professor Jussara
ESOL 0360
26 April 2019
Should Students be Required to Wear Uniforms to School?
Parents always want the best to come for their children, especially when it comes to
education and child development. Since the children spend most of their time at school, the
importance and influence of school environment are tremendous to children’s everyday life.
Every school has its own policies and regulation to govern their students and the education
systems. There is not a definite method to become the perfect governance for all students’
development because each student is a different piece of the whole school picture. One of the
policies, which have been publicly debated for quite a long time, is that whether or not the
students are required to wear uniforms to school. This research paper is going to prove that the
students should wear uniforms to school because wearing uniforms help students save time and
energy, reduce peer pressure, and more likely to improve the academic performance.
First, wearing uniforms helps students to save time and energy on choosing clothes every
morning. Thus, students will have more time and energy to spend on improving other practical
values, such as learning, interpersonal skills, etc, instead of such materialistic values as clothes.
The main goal of the students are to study and develop the skills, so it is less important for them
to pay attention to clothes as well as appearance at this stage.
Second, wearing uniforms can help students prevent from peer pressure when it comes to
the differences between the rich and the poor. During 1996 State of the Union Speech, President
Clinton stated, “If it means teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, our
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public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms.” Students, whose
souls are usually fragile at the young age, would easily feel hurt and saddened when they
compare themselves to their peers, especially if their clothes are not as nice as those of other
students in the same school are. The sadness from peer pressure could have multiple
consequences. For instance, the underprivileged students, who recognize the difference and
inferiority of their own clothes in comparison to those of their peers, would tend to be more
reserved, and less carefree when socializing. They tend to avoid contacts with other privileged
students in order to lessen their own embarrassment. As a result, it could lead to depression and
academic downgrade for the underprivileged students because their minds are distracted by peer
pressure, sadness, and self-esteems. In worse cases, these underprivileged students would risk
their self-esteem to trade for trendy clothes as other peers, by shoplifting, stealing or insisting
