At first glance, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom’s executive decree last week making school uniforms voluntary attire in public schools of all levels can be seen as a pragmatic and humanistic intervention. The education systems in the poorest countries of the region, one could surely argue, have long put an undue burden on the poor, and it's about time someone took a stand. And why not - they're just clothes, right?“I can’t imagine the anguish of a parent that is unable to send his or her children to school,” Colom explained at his press conference. “In a way,” he added, “this is an act of income redistribution.” In a country where nearly 35% of the citizenry is functionally illiterate and the primary school completion rates are uncommonly low, Colom may be on to something. Guatemala is now the only place in the region (of which I am aware) to adapot national policy of voluntary uniforms.
For US citizens, the decree will make Colom sound like a true reformer, one in tune with civil liberties and the kinds of freedoms enjoyed in the US since the landmark Tinker V. Des Moines Supreme court case in 1969.
The decree, which also banned the ever-present “voluntary" school fees in most of the country’s public schools, follows a similar move last year from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (where the act, incidentally, caused such an influx in enrollments that the government was unable to keep pace with teachers and infrastructure, and faced massive teacher strikes at the start of the school year).
While Colom’s intentions may be in the right place, the decree’s intended effects, however, are far from guaranteed. To be sure, for the vast majority of Guatemalans for whom school uniforms make school potentially a cost-prohibitive luxury, freedom of expression has not tended to be much of a concern. Three issues, however, call into question the wisdom of Colom’s seemingly rationale decision:
First, inherency: if uniforms are cost-prohibitive, why not just help families pay for them? Public and private financial assistance programs for books, uniforms, and other private costs to families have existed for years in countries such as El Salvador, Chile, Colombia, Mexico – and even in Guatemala. Nobody is complaining about the uniforms – just their marginal cost.
Second is the stigma that goes along with sending their child to a school where the social expectation is to send them in uniform. Changing culture is easier said than done, and in Guatemala, where formality and attire hold a particular cultural premium, no parent will want their child to be the exception to the norm, if not the rule. Those without uniforms will be segregating themselves, and potentially opening themselves up to a host of new challenges, biases, and mistreatment.
Third, the issue of allowing decorum to slide is apparently a monumental security concern for urban schools --where the majority of Guatemalan’s students are enrolled, and youth gangs and maras are real threats. “With this new rule, we won’t be able to tell who’s committing (acts of violence), noted one urban school teacher in Guatemala City.
Thus, at the start of the next school year, when the new policy takes effect, parents will face a new choice -- not on "if" and "where" to send their children to school, but how to dress him or her. How parents make this choice will be interesting to monitor, just as will the question of whether Colom’s move sets the trends for other populist-prone leaders in the region, or serves as a cautionary tale.
Sources: Prensa Libre, El Diario de Hoy, Wikipedia, Univision, El Nuevo Diario
7 comments:
Very controversial move indeed. It seems that this may cause more discrimination in schools as those without uniforms can be singled out and picked on among their peers especially in more urban areas. I believe that in the US some public schools have turned to uniforms in part to help parents save money and in part to lesses pressure on students to wear certain fashions whether they be high fashion and costly or gang related. I understand that the uniforms may be relatively more expensive in Guatemala for many families and definitely agree with you that providing subsidies for uniforms would be a better option. It appears that the reasoning behind the decree to make uniforms optional is somewhat muddled: is it an issue of students' freedom or uniform cost?
I don't know if you are aware that one of the big problems with uniforms is that many schools changed uniform every year in order to bring extra cash to teachers who were also selling/making them. Parents had to buy new ones every year in public schools. If you attend a private school in Guatemala your uniform is good until you outgrow it, not so in public schools.
While I agree that uniforms in the long run can help reduce costs of clothing, I think the move to make them a choice is a good one. The uniform "mafias" will not be able to profit from parents who are already struggling financially.
Ale, thanks for this comment. I didn't know about the "uniform mafias" in Guatemala, but I still have my doubts about the financial boon this move means for poor parents - particulatly in light of the potential tradeoffs I noted.
If economies of scale have been created around uniforms, the void created by the lost income around those will surely be filled by something else - perhaps changed yearly, as well, and sold the same way. It could be textbooks, it could be some sort of arm-band or quasi-uniform, or just about anything we could imagine. My main point is that I think changing culture - even a micro-culture such as school uniforms - is hard to do by presidential decree. It will be interesting to see what happens.
First, inherency: if uniforms are cost-prohibitive, why not just help families pay for them?
The two approaches meant to achieve this - public and private assistance - are both problematic.
If it's private, you won't see full coverage - a patchwork of institutions and mechanisms will be difficult to keep track of and will inevitable never reach many children.
If it's public, you create another bureaucracy that will inevitably be inefficient.
I feel like a better route would have been to let individuals schools institute a voluntary uniform policy. Rural schools could opt of our uniform requirements while urban school with security concerns could keept them in place.
Gullet, I don't necessarily agree with either of the stereotypes of the private / public provision of economic assistance, but your idea of devolving the policy decision to schools or districts is interesting. I am all for local decision-making, but it might, however, lead to more controversy and political noise than desired at the local level, where each and every district or school leader would have to make the decision (a political one) and then be responsible for the local public reactions to it. I would guess that those who would opt to keep the rule in place would do so at their own peril.
Connecticut's answer to Colom:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/nyregion/connecticut/05uniformct.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
I do believe a better way to handle school uniforms and not change an entire culture is to find a way to furnish all the children with correct attire.
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