Contrary to popular belief, school uniforms are neither an authoritarian relic nor a retrograde symbol. Rather, as Jean-Claude Kaufmann shows, it reveals our delicate balance between equality, freedom and a sense of community.
The school uniform is a hand-sewn paradox. In Europe, it's regarded as a relic of another age, a vestige of a school of authority and conformity. Yet, as French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann shows in L’uniforme scolaire («School uniform») (Armand Colin, 2025), there's nothing old-fashioned about it. In most countries of the world, the uniform is neither a symbol of order nor of the past: it is simply normal. A matter of course. Continental Europe is the exception.
Kaufmann traces the history of this garment that says so much about society. Uniforms were not born to discipline, but to equalize. It first appeared in the charity schools founded in England in the mid-16th century, initiated by Christ's Hospital in London. These schools took in orphans and children from deprived families, with a precise aim: to prevent their social exclusion through education. They offered them a protective environment - a roof over their heads, meals and a common uniform - to guarantee a form of equality from the moment they entered school. The uniform was therefore born of a project for emancipation. It's this very ideal that partly explains its global spread.
Explosive topic in Europe
From Africa to Asia, it has become a way of life. In Japan, some schools even call on designers like Armani to create elegant, modern uniforms. In the USA, Bill Clinton made uniforms an instrument of pacification in the 1990s. He believed that uniforms could be a way of easing tensions between students. Everywhere else in the world, wearing a uniform doesn't shock. On the contrary, it's a regular feature of school life, not an exception.
And yet, on our continent, the subject remains explosive. In Europe, the debate is immediately polarized: some praise the discipline it symbolizes, others denounce it as an attack on freedom. Kaufmann sees a paradox here: historically, it was the left that supported uniforms, in the name of social justice and valuing school as an important place for acquiring knowledge. Today, it's often the right that takes it up. The left has changed sides.
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Switzerland illustrates this European malaise, but without the rhetorical tensions seen elsewhere. In 2006, a school in Basel tried an experiment: some forty pupils were given a uniform designed by a local stylist - cargo pants, hoodie, cap. Too modern, too similar to what the children were already wearing. The result was a failure. The uniform had lost all meaning, failing to respect the aesthetic code that everyone subconsciously expects: a certain solemnity, an air of seriousness, a form of elegance. The mistake was not in the principle, but in the cut.
This is the finesse of Kaufmann's analysis: the uniform is more than just a piece of cloth. It says something about our relationship with the collective, and the importance attached to school as a place different from the rest of life. With his book, Kaufmann reminds us that the uniform, at heart, is neither retrograde nor avant-garde. It's a miniature laboratory of our contradictions: between equality and distinction, between belonging and freedom.
Deputy Director of the Institut libéral, Nicolas Jutzet is an editor at Regard Libre.
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Jean-Claude Kaufmann
L’uniforme scolaire («School uniform»)
Armand Colin
August 2025
208 pages
French 
German 
English