Persuasive Essay on School Uniforms

Space is a crucial part of the battle for control and surveillance of individuals and not for domination (Elden and Crampton, 2007). According to Bourdieu (1984), 'all social space is made up of multiple competing, intersecting and hierarchically positioned fields with their own distinctive features'. Physical spaces within schools are not already there space is a social construction that embodies pedagogic thinking and assumptions about distance and hierarchy.

The Changing Room

Secondary physical education ' is the subject that makes and breaks students for better and for worse. Many students' dislike of physical education started from the uniform and the control the teachers had over implementing the uniform standards (Flintoff and Scraton, 2001). Not only that, for most secondary students, PE changing rooms were the place where the most bullying occurred (Jim©nez-Barbero et al., 2020). Students had to change out in the open with all their peers crammed into a small, cold, and tile-floored changing room, with no means to hide their semi-naked bodies, which sometimes put off some students from being PE (O'Donovan et al, 2015). This often left students feeling uncomfortable due to body consciousness (Flintoff and Scraton, 2001), and for some, these negative experiences contributed to the development of self-perceptions of inferiority and negative body image (Stankov et al., 2012).

David Buckingham (2007) defines identity as something unique to us individually and that has similar and different attributes as others. Similarly, Erik Erikson (1968) states that adolescence is a significant period for identity formation ' Young people become self-aware of their strengths and weaknesses and become confident in their qualities that are unique to them. Bauman's (2013) theory of liquid modernity is a growing belief that 'change is only permanence and uncertainty the only certainty'. This implies that nothing is stable and change can happen very quickly in any situation ' Students changing from their uniform into their PE kit are changing from their own identity into a different one to become part of a 'team'; they are changing from being an individual into becoming united with others. This supports the ideas of Foucault as he depicts that identity is not fixed and not defined by what we first consider; we are able to make decisions on what we do and how we do it. This links to O'Donovan and Kirk (2007) as they state that adolescent females wear earrings and makeup to be part of a 'girly' identity group and that their appearance reasserts their 'membership' of this identity group. It can be said that there are clearly defined roles based on gender, sexuality, and gender as adolescents have made themselves a reflexive project for themselves (Giddens, 1984).