RE: school uniforms and apes

I didn't realize that Kai had posted about that article.  I wrote him an email in response to this letter.  (first, if you haven't read it yet, here's the link http://www.yifutuan.org/archive/2009/20090316.htm)  Here's what I had to say:

I'm not really sure what his point was.  He seems to be arguing that uniformity (as opposed to individualism or diversity) will produce higher intellectualism.  He claims that focusing on multiculturalism forces students to focus on creating social relationships, degrading our status to that of apes and chimps who can only focus on getting food and maintaining social relationships when taken from lab-settings and put into natural habitats.  Isn't that what college is thus teaching us- to enter our natural habitat and succeed in our relationships and survive?  We 'get food' through the application of our studies into a paying job, and we continually maintain (or break) relationships.

So does he think that what puts us above apes and chimps is our ability to think abstractly while still being to 'get food' and maintain relationships?  I feel that if you continue his logic (being that the goal of higher education is to focus on cultivating abstract thinkers), it will lead to a similar conclusion, but with worse consequences.  If we graduate only abstract thinkers (which is what labs do with the apes) then what will happen when put into our 'natural environment' (or 'real world' as we call it)?  We will still need to focus on 'getting food' and maintaining relationships.  Only now, we have lots of abstract knowledge that is (according to him) mutually exclusive from, and therefore useless in performing these more mundane tasks.  Thus, we will have thousands of people who can measure neutrons and integrate equations but struggle/fail to 'get food' and maintain healthy relationships.  Therefore, aren't public universities, now that they're cultivating multifaceted relationships, producing citizens that can survive and contribute to society more completely and holistically?

While I don't necessarily think that clustered colleges (whether by race, ethnicity, gender, etc), are a bad thing, I wouldn't encourage them across the board.  For one thing, it's hard to maintain 'separate but equal', which is what Brown v. Board attempted to fix.  Second, I think the interpersonal lessons-learned are just as important as the academic knowledge that is learned.  Think what a sad and unbalanced world we'd live in if everyone lived and learned from their own type of people.  How are new ideas devised and exchanged?  Obviously I'm taking this to the extreme- we could never achieve complete segregation.  But I think lessons can be learned and points can be made by observing the extremes.

There is something to be said about school uniforms for sure.  I teeter-totter on this issue.  I do think they help level the social (and sometimes even the academic) playing field.  However, this can be overridden- for example when a family can only afford one uniform for the student to wear each day, while other families can buy multiple uniforms and plenty of complementary accessories.  But I also think uniforms stifle the personal expression and exploration that is so important in adolescent development (at least in US culture).  It's definitely not a black and white issue.