Face Blindness and School Uniforms

                    By Bill Choisser 3/27/2005

Research coming out of Germany today has given us a major new
tool in our arsenal against those who would enforce uniforms or
other standardized dress upon school students:

  http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7174

Until recently, we have believed the number of students impacted
by face blindness to be extremely small.  The German research has
revealed that about 2% of the general population is afflicted,
a much larger number, and one large enough that just about any
student body will contain members who have it.

This is relevant to the uniform issue because individuals with
face blindness heavily use the differing clothing and hair styles
of those around them to tell them apart:

  http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/look.html

Most face blind children find there are a few children in their
school whom they can readily identify, and they befriend those.
These become their social group, and they get most of their social
development interacting with those students.  The face blind
student will also be driven to look different from other people
around him in his own eyes, in order to form a sense of self.
This is not apt to make him appear particularly eccentric, but
he will likely appear on the periphery of what is regarded as
within the normal range.

To force everyone to look alike strips the face blind student of
his social group and of his own identity.  He finds he has no
sense of who he is, and he finds he cannot befriend anybody,
because you can't make friends with people if you cannot tell
them from others.  To imagine the situation this student finds
himself in, consider how you would fare in a school where all of
the students were as identical as identical twins!  Then imagine
how much worse it would be if the students were all made to
have similar hair styles and wear uniforms!

To date, we have advised parents of face blind children to avoid
schools with uniforms to give their children a fighting chance
at achieving normal social development.  These children are fighting
a very uphill struggle even in a school without uniforms; in a
school with them the problems they face are unsurmountable and such
children will most likely be lost.

We have also advised parents to seek excuse of such students from
any activities where uniforms are required, such as physical
education.  Other students pick up on their child's vulnerability
in such settings and often victimize their child while he is unable
to identify the perpetrators.

Where are these children now?  Many of them have been steered to
non-uniform schools by parents who have sensed the difficulty.
Many of them are autistic or Asperger children, or are diagnosed
as such and steered into protective social settings that may not
even be necessary if the school were not so particular about what
everyone looked like.  Some of them are students who are insistent
on wearing items of clothing the school has rules against, and when
forced to not wear that clothing, they lose their sense of self and
just withdraw into themselves, or they withdraw from school.
Without a sense of self, many of them cannot muster the mental
structures required to conform with behavior rules, and they run
afoul of such rules and drop out.  Some of these children run afoul
of the system due to problems at specific required activities,
such as physical education, where uniforms are required, if their
school does not have uniforms throughout the day, and nevertheless
have some behavioral difficulties because of these activities.

Since the problems these children face are related to what everyone
else wears as well as what they wear themselves, merely exempting
a face blind student from uniform requirements solves only a small
fraction of the student's problems.  These students have a serious
disability which is made far worse when other students are forced to
look more alike than they would if simply left alone to wear what
they would naturally choose to wear.

The point being made here is that this new research brings one to
the conclusion that every school system is likely to have students
with a serious disability which will be greatly exacerbated by a
uniforms requirement.  The harm such a requirement will cause to
these children is so great compared to any benefit to having
uniforms that might otherwise accrue, that uniforms should not be
instituted in a school.

Incidentally, we have found that such children do not have problems
with rules that merely mandate modesty or cleanliness.  Only when
rules go so far as to outlaw certain types of clothing, or styles or
lengths of hair, do they become a problem for these students.

Bill Choisser
http://www.choisser.com/faceblind/