School uniforms

are in the spotlight again.
I know they are "expensive" and "boring" and "stupid" and now they are apparently "sexist" as well.
Someone has apparently complained because their little darling was expected to wear a skirt instead of trousers to school. The Equal Opportunity Commissioner weighed in and said the little darling must be allowed to wear trousers. Then there were the usual comments about boys wearing dresses.
     "Stupid, stupid," was Ms W's comment, "Our uniform is nothing to do with all that." 
So, what did she think her uniform was about?
     "It's about belonging and before you say anything it isn't all about just everyone being the same."
Right, I got the message.
     "I know exactly what to wear and how to wear it. I don't have to think about it - well except for starting out tidy," she told me.
      "But what about the others?" I asked, "Do you think they might like to wear civvies all  the time?"
She gave this some thought and then, surprisingly, said, "No. You know that thing about competing over clothes? That would happen and some of them have really fancy stuff but most of us just have ordinary from Target and places like that."
     "And the charity shop?"
She grinned. Ms W likes to find things in the charity shop if she can. It's much cheaper and she can save her allowance for other things.  At home at weekends she looks as bad as her father or the Senior Cat.
     "At least we don't have those tunic things you had," she told me. 
Ms W finds it hard to believe that yes, like all of my generation and Middle Cat's generation and the Black Cat's generation, I wore those appalling box pleated  three pleats front and back tunics. We had a school blouse and a school tie and a V-neck pullover and a blazer. It was, apart from the tunic, a sort of uniform for boys I suppose. We wore it with berets in winter. In summer we switched to shirtwaist dresses and wore straw hats. We wore socks in primary school and stockings in secondary school....and we wore gloves all year round. 
The prefects checked us (including shiny shoes) as we went in and out. At one school the teachers were checked as well - the headmistress said that what was good enough for the students was good enough for the staff. Nobody wore trousers.
Would trousers have been nice? I suppose they might have been. I live in them now - but I work from home so I don't need to dress up. 
Did it do us any harm? The tunics were awful but we were all in the same position.  There was plenty of room for what we thought of as real clothes outside school. I suspect they got discussed rather a lot while I had my nose stuck in a book. I know some of the girls spent hours designing clothes but the idea of wearing them to school would not have appealed to them.
Ms W is right. You don't really have to think about school uniform. It is just there. You  wear it or you don't wear it.
I don't know whether that is a good thing or not. What I do know is that it is, strictly speaking, an equal opportunity issue. It is something that applies to everyone within Ms W's school community.  
No uniform would be a very different opportunity issue.