It's official: The largest school district in the United States has adopted school uniforms. Over half a million New York City elementary school students will be required to adhere to a dress code by fall 1999. The school board president said the policy is "important for decreasing peer pressure and promoting pride school", but that it is not "an act of magic to transform schools overnight... It will not replace good teaching, good principals, small classrooms". It's a fashion trend that's spreading. From Los Angeles to Louisiana, from Maryland to Miami, public schools are discussing, and in many cases adopting, the old charter school idea. School uniforms are designed to help children focus on algebra instead of high shoes; to have students compete for grades rather than jackets. “It helps to get up in the morning and not have to think about what you're going to wear,” said Maria, a sixth-grader who swims, plays soccer and wears exactly what everyone else at her high school in Washington, D.C. does. Every school day, Maria wears an all-white oxford shirt, brown shoes, and a gray/brown plaid skirt that must be long enough to touch the ground when she kneels. After school and on weekends, of course, all bets are off. Maria has a simple but effective strategy: she borrows her friends' clothes, typically baggy jeans. According to Reginald Wilson, a senior scholar at the American Council on Education in Washington, school uniforms also relieve pressure on students to pay exorbitant prices for clothes. , D.C. "I think it reduces the cost of clothes, and kids don't put as much importance on clothes when they're all wearing the same thing," Wilson said. “Certainly the competition to wear the best shoes or the best sweaters and so on has been prevalent in school since I went to school, and poor kids felt inferior.” Training? The "training" argument says that when you are employed, you will probably have to wear a uniform. It is true? What are the chances that children will wear a uniform later in life? Typically, the occupations where people have to wear uniforms are the lowest paid ones, nothing to look forward to, really. In general, the more educated people are, the less they will wear the uniform later in life. Look at the teachers, they don't wear uniform! Well-paid work tends to reject uniformity, and for good reason, the needs of the future include qualities such as assertiveness, creativity, individuality, originality, a spontaneous personality, being enterprising, taking initiative, being able to deal with change, etc.