I’ve been thinking all day about students with their heads bent over their desks.
Well, perhaps not thinking about it, but the picture has come again and again into my mind.
Along with the thought: what’s what the child, the student, is wearing got to do with anything then?
Nothing. The mind is occupied. The student is studying.
Too busy with their own studying to notice or care what anyone else is wearing, or what they are themselves wearing.
I keep returning to this ludicrous compulsory uniforms thing.
Can’t get it out of my mind.
They love uniforms, some people. Some people who should know better. Some people in Education (with a capital ‘E’). Educators.
Supposedly ‘Educators’, though obviously, in reality, not so.
They seem to think that anyone, anywhere, wearing a uniform presents a case for children wearing uniforms in schools.
Because they wear uniforms in the military, they should wear uniforms in schools.
I don’t think they argue that because they wear uniforms in Woolworths, they should wear uniforms in schools – though this would be a more pertinent argument.
It is interesting to pursue the military uniform thing for a while.
Why do the military wear uniforms? To make them cleverer? Better educated? Better able to learn?
That’s a joke, isn’t it. No one has ever accused the military of being clever, or even well educated and certainly not capable of learning quick lessons. As untold thousands of dead and maimed soldiers testifies.
Why people keep going to their deaths as soldiers is a most intriguing question. But for sometimes/somewhere else.
Back to our question. So if it is not for the purposes of education what do the military don uniforms for? To raise morale? To generate an ‘esprit de corps’?
Quite the opposite, as anyone who’s ever been in the military should be able to testify. I’ve been there. I can testify.
The uniform is intended to put you in your place – and that, generally, is at the bottom of the heap. The uniform is intended to make you well aware of that fact.
But that’s today. That’s the use of the uniform in military training establishments probably the world over.
Where did the uniforms come from?
Well it is as mundane and ordinary as a need to identify your own side. In the smoke and heat and commotion of battle.
They are simply a means of identification in the first place.
And then they get modified to provide utility.
And then they get modified to glorify the leaders and make clear the difference between them and ‘the men’ or ‘the other ranks’ or ‘the foot soldiers’ or ‘the cannon fodder’.
Witness the ludicrous popinjay effect of many uniforms of the past – possibly nowhere so evident as in the former ‘British Empire’ which got there, and maintained itself there, on the bodies of thousands of ‘common soldiers’, ‘other ranks’, ‘tommies’ – poor, miserable, ‘lower class’ cannon fodder in drab khaki.
We’ve all seen – haven’t we? – those military leaders with a chest full, quite literally, full, a rectangular ‘board’ covering virtually the whole chest, of medal ribbons. How comical. How ridiculous. How pathetic. As though this overweight, flabby, bibulous, pompous, overpaid, underworked, cretinous bore had been a hero in countless battles…
While the real ‘heroes’ of countless battles, those who were in the front line day after day after day, month after month, year after year…. wear, perhaps, one small ‘campaign ribbon’.
How terrifying when we consider such as these and such as those who put him there and keep him there (in that comic cuts uniform) are those that decide the fates of nations and engineer the death, maiming and destruction of thousands, even millions.
Such is the nature of our world and such it apparently always was.
Essentially the soldier has to be dehumanised and the uniform plays a large part in that. You are an anonymous nothing. This has to be made clear to early in your training. You must learn ‘group think’ or ‘hive mentality’ or whatever: you must learn that the good of the whole clearly transcends the good for yourself.
You must be prepared to sacrifice yourself for the whole.
That is an imperative – uniform or not the army cannot continue unless the ‘men’ are prepared to die or be mutilated.
Isn’t that ironic in itself? Customarily the common soldiers are referred to as ‘the men’ by their fatuous, popinjay, mindless leaders. As though to proclaim to the world that there are the ‘men’. Not here, amongst the leaders. But there amongst the ‘other ranks’ of soldiers.
Amongst the leaders we – they seem to be saying, admitting – we find no men.
But back to the uniform thing:
Where simply wearing a hat or a headscarf, an armband or any of a number of other contrivances would serve to identify you in a combat situation, a complete uniform has a much more pervasive and potent ability.
It covers you. It submerges you entirely. You are part of it. You are in it. You are gone. It remains.
We were taught that we must salute our officers and it was justified to us thus: You are saluting the uniform the officer wears.
You see? The uniform is bigger than the men. And bigger than the officers, they pretend. Humanity is gone. It is baldly stated so. Humanity is gone and all that is left is this robot construction – an ‘army’ and ‘discipline’ and ‘uniformity’.
You are further dehumanised by being forced to spend many hours slaving ludicrously over this uniform – polishing parts, ironing parts just so, cleaning, tending, adjusting…. like an obsessive compulsive you must labour over tiny details of your uniform lest you be punished………..
The t.v. was pleased, some time ago, to show us a few shows about the Coldstream Guards in England, the soldiers that guard the Queen and stand guard in their big black ‘busby’ hats at the palace gates. This is a very proud regiment. The longest serving regiment in the British Army or somesuch. Very proud warriors, very proud indeed.
We saw these young heroes at work polishing and neurotically tending their uniforms in an absolute fever and fervour for days, weeks on end….
A madness that’s difficult to believe, something out of Lewis Carroll you’d think, akin to the mad hatter’s tea party, but in fact something the British Army and that Regiment take very seriously indeed.
That’s what uniforms lead to. That’s the end result of dress uniformity….