Audio and transcript

What do you think about school uniforms? Are they a good or a bad thing?

• Liz: Well, they’re cheaper for parents.
• Lyndon: Are they?
• Liz: Yeah! Because you only need one set of clothing, and quite often it means that all the children be dressed alike, cos even if you can’t get the school uniform, you can usually get school uniforms from associations.
• Lyndon: Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it? This idea of everybody looking the same so you don’t have competitive fashion, but it was very competitive at my school. We all had school uniforms.
• Cheryl: That’s what my opinion is, that everyone says that they make everyone equal but there are still ways for the classes to distinguish themselves by the brand of shoes or socks or jewelry or… There are ways that they can get around the equality factor, if they want to.
• Liz: Well, I agree but it’s not… In my school, you certainly couldn’t have different brand shoes or jewellery, so it’s more about how you wear the school uniform. So, in terms of financial status, it wasn’t really about financial status but how cool you were. Like how you wore your tie was really important.
• Lyndon: Oh yeah, yeah.
• Liz: And we had ties with a stripe, so it was really cool to pick the stripes out of the tie.
• Cheryl: Nice.
• Lyndon: I don’t know about if it would be nice to wear, you know, wearing your own clothes at school. I think it just gets that, that… To be honest, even though I think there is bad things to say about school uniforms, I don’t like the idea of wearing your own clothes. It’s too much of a fashion spectacle.
• Cheryl: Yeah, there is usually dress…In America, at least there are dress codes, and I’ve never wear… I never wore a uniform. And it wasn’t… You could definitely tell who had more money by what they wore, but at least in my school, it wasn’t as big a deal as it can be in some places.
• Liz: I think the other thing is I kind of, for me, I have an idea that when I’m working or when I’m at school, I have to wear different clothing. And you definitely… I definitely have sort of integrated in me that there’s… It sort of feels like there’s the me that does work and goes to school, and then there’s a kind of the other me that’s outside of that area that gets to kind of be a fuller person.
• Cheryl: Express yourself!
• Liz: Maybe not just express yourself but, you know, there is some things that you shouldn’t be doing in the workplace that you can do in your spare time. The things that you shouldn’t be doing…
• Cheryl: Weekend!
• Liz: You shouldn’t be doing at school and you get to do when you’re outside of school. So it kind of… There’s a… It helps you maybe get a mindset of this is about working and this is about my free time.
• Cheryl: I like that!

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