I've discovered the secret to world peace! The reason that everyone in the world doesn't get along is that we don't all dress the same. It's too late for old folk who have finished school; we must start educating our youth about this discovery. Of course, kids are resistant to being taught, so we'll have to force them to dress the same...

There is nothing new about the idea that the secret to harmony is making everyone look the same. But paintings are made of different colours, songs of different instruments, and the Earth of different cultures.

Pro-conformity is no surprise in a province which blatantly ignores it own cultural, historical, and humanitarian education. Many novels—like George Orwell's {1984} and Aldous Huxley's {Brave New World}—have examined the future of state-enforced homogeneity, and have depicted very dysfunctional realms. The premise is simple: if people are taught that they cannot get along unless they all dress the same, the idea spreads to all areas of life, and soon everyone must think the same. Many people don't see this as a problem, but with everyone thinking the same, new ideas become not only rare, but criminal. And, frankly, that sucks.

We're not there yet, obviously, but history shows equally unsavoury consequences. Communism, a noble idea, has never managed to get on its feet. Nature continually fights sameness. Stories exist of small, rural, harshly conformist communities paying outsiders to widen the gene pool. Everyone at a UN gathering is not dressed the same. How would someone raised among visual clones perform in a "real-world" inter-cultural encounter? Uniforms don't just "even the playing field", they foster xenophobia.

If uniformed students are "dressed for work", what kind of place are they working in? Certainly not a place which fosters free-thinking. And these days, who wears a uniform to work? Today's top paid people dress casually. Uniforms do not "eliminate socioeconomic competition", they foster it by training people to consider anyone who doesn't have a uniform as inferior.

Uniforms hide difference and rob people of the chance to learn to understand, appreciate, and deal with it. Uniforms teach people that it's {right} to dislike someone for wearing the wrong style jeans or shirt. Instead of teaching students not to discriminate against each other, uniform advocates say its better to have nothing to discriminate against. Great. If he had his way, Hitler too would have finished with nothing to discriminate against.

If people were taught to appreciate and enjoy difference instead of avoid it and compete against it, may be there would be fewer conflicts in this world. Anyone who can only "work together to achieve a common goal" with people who look the same is seriously crippled. Students who "behave better" in uniforms are being taught that uniformity is essential to productivity. New ideas are more often than not bad ideas. But if we didn't think of new ideas, we would never have good ideas. We must encourage diversity and work with the bad ideas to achieve the good ones, which are usually "out there". But in a room full of clones, who wants to risk putting forward an "out there" idea?

People don't look the same, and we have to learn to accept that. If we want to train our kids to "join the workforce" in the offices downtown, then sure, they're never too young to wear the uniform. (Why not start preschoolers on time clock cards?) But if we want to show kids that there are more important things than how they dress, we should show them that how they dress doesn't matter.

People raised uniformly will think, act, work, and live uniformly. Arguments for the "benefits" of conformity are aimed at people who will not think critically about those arguments—people who were probably raised in uniforms anyway.