Article Rebuttal
Amanda Gapski
BCOM/275
October 1, 2012
Kim Hinton

This is an article that is in favor of school uniforms. It claims that uniforms offer safety in the environment and helps stop competition about clothes (Boutelle, 2007). It does offer some good, albeit rhetorical, claims for uniforms. It lays claim that uniforms offer “uniformity” so that children are easier to keep track of in on field trips and allows administration and students to know who doesn’t belong in the school. It also claims that uniforms stop children from wearing gang colors and uniforms help children to feel as though they are a part of the adult world. That they will learn for the future of “uniform word dress” by wearing uniforms in school. While all of these may be, in an aspect true, I believe that uniforms tend to lead children away from originality. There aren’t any statistics that prove that public schools that require uniforms have any better academics than public schools that don’t. there is not information backing the claims which disproves the actual validity of the data. It’s a biased article that allows no information proving one way or another whether uniforms are a benefit or a hindrance. She does quote Bill Clinton from his 1996 state of the union address where he challenged schools “to teach character education, to teach good values and good citizenship. And if it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms” (Boutelle, 2007). This is an overstatement of the strongest sense. While kids won’t be wearing the designer jackets to school, they will still wear them after school and on the weekends. Uniforms don’t stop the problem. I believe they create more of a problem. Uniforms are expensive and with uniforms come two sets of clothes,