What is the experience of wearing a school uniform every day? Do people typically get used to it or dislike it?
10.06.2025 13:06
Only senior boys were singled out for this black business look. Junior boys and all girls had blue blazers and jumpers. Juniors also optionally had brown strap shoes. Changing the blazer colour has to be credited a non-cruel way to have a difference between junior and senior boys, and I've never heard of it done that way anywhere else, as usually schools with blazers are very corporately invested in the colour. But it seems insulting to the girls, yet the deputy head was a woman. Perhaps it was insulting to the boys, that only we should be put into such businessy gloom. Oddly, some girls, eventually just 1 family, who had older style blazers with the same striped pattern as the tie, were allowed to keep wearing them, years after they ceased to be the new issue standard. There was that chaotic laxness, yet the head was always fanatically strict in making us all keep our top shirt buttons done up, which was uncomfortable so distracting and worked against our performance.
Before Balfour, previous private school Monkton House had a less bad uniform in 3 ways: shorts stayed allowed all through junior school, grey shirts less stupid than white for keeping clean, maroon blazer a more spirit lifting colour than black. Still the same illogical neck and tie issue: maroon'n'yellow stripes tie.
So all suffering of its uniform was completely wasted. There is not a shred of good to show for that it ever existed.
At least the anti-leg attitude seemed to be across gender, as not until the school was in broken confidence and decline in my last 2 years there after my crash, years when I would not have been back there but for needing to escape from arrogant dictatoriality by my CAMHS unit ! did the typical misery of seeing short socks freedom for girls happen much. They were allowed woolly tights and in the earlier years they always seemed to be in either them or long socks. But only 2 Muslim girls were allowed trousers. So I will grant Balfour that it was way not as bad, for gendered cruelty to older boys, as the high schools in some class photos I have seen online who let the girls wear mini-skirts and be all leggy, generally parked in the photos' front rows flaunting it ! Of course I would never have fallen for going to Balfour if it had been like that, would have immediately found it unbearable.
There is always a character difference between the passively accepting and the rights conscious. There is no typical, towards oppressive treatment. There is being conned, too. I from age 8 was conned to believe that a private school with tyrannical petty rules and bad tempered teachers was going to deliver something good, in proving accelerated achievements possible and bypassing the waste of time primary years I was suffering from elsewhere. The school's nature self-defeated all its own chance to achieve those things + instead gave me a terrifying pressure abuse breakdown at 13-14. With today's autism knowledge of sensory issues I would have rejected going there. For what I'm life abuse angriest for is the long trousers, all year round from as early as age 8, for all boys above the first primary year after infants class.
This is from 1977-85 and in exactly the type of treat like dirt tyrannical right wing private school where the paedos who sickly romanticise them expect to find year round shorts uniforms. But Balfour House was the total opposite of what they expect, and in its region South Wales, which has a nasally irritating damp air climate causing catarrhal symptoms like a persistent cold, shorts uniforms were not a thing. South Wales was even the exiled wrong place for me, I'm Scottish, a knee loving background. Because it was before the web, and the broadcast media never mention them, even when debating uniforms overall, I actually went my entire schooldays not knowing, not imagining in my wildest dreams, that the yrar round shorts uniforms existed, that I have the trauma of now knowing were widespread in most of the rest of Britain. As I have an autistic sensory issue for shorts and strong identity feeling, not getting them and getting the complete opposite was cruel, and lifelong messes with your head.
So, these trousers, hot black too, were essentially part of a gloomy business suit look. Black blazer, white shirt, blue tie with black'n'white stripes, optional grey jumper, grey socks, black hard shoes. Duffle coat seemed to change from light grey to dark blue-grey murk over time. Prefect appointment changed the tie, to plain dark blue with one school badge on it, late in my time changed to black with repeating school badges all down it.
It did not allow us to go home in PE kit, though the PE site had no showers, and changing us back into uniform just to go home in, even on a hot day, delayed bussing us 2 miles back to school to connect into the main school buses, so delayed everyone.
The reason why I got private school, with smoney strain and charitable help until my scholarship, was that my autistic early reading had been wishfully misread as giftedness and fixed in all the adults' heads an overestimate of my abilities that would become disastrous in school's harder later years with long answer problem solving questions I was no good at, unlike earlier when I was good with simple facts. It took on a life of its own out of my control. But still we would never have gone private without bad cause from state school. My state primary school that disapproved of my early reading and said reading should not be allowed until you are 7, had had no uniform. Nor had the CAMHS unit later. So all my changes of school were to a worse uniform position and would not have happened without the old school doing something stupid authoritarianly.
What's it like to have an IQ of 140 to 170? Do people notice you're different?
Located in the fairly right wing and comfortable Vale of Glamorgan, Balfour was a populist, simple certainties, fear ruled, short-lived flash in the pan school, with no weekly extracurricular life, that was reckless about advance streaming and fantasising of high abilities, and hot on homework and tests, which by keeping us in fear, made us do worse. It got consistently bad results, it failed by the self-defeating wrongness of these ideas. My outcome was a key cause of tipping into its decline towards closure. This after I was its first scholarship boy. It was more poorly resourced than the competing state schools, too, using old tatty textbooks and tatty photocopied graph paper. It was fearsomely shouty and seemed to collect unkind bad tempered teachers intentionally. The headmaster used to bellow RAA RAAAA RAAAAAA RAAAAAAAAAAAAH! so loudly it blasted through the school and so often that it has been remembered on fb as like boot camp, and told a boy being added to his roll for daily terror checks on homework offenders: "TAKE YOUR HANDS OUT OF YOUR POCKETS ... I HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE YOUR LIFE MISERY ... YOUR FATHER WORKS VERY HARD AS A DENTIST ... DON'T YOU THINK IT'S DISGRACEFUL? ... I HAVE THE POWER TO MAKE YOU WORK AND I'M GOING TO MAKE YOU WORK ... YOU WILL BRING YOUR HOMEWORK TO ME EVERY MORNING ... IF YOU FORGET, HEAVEN HELP YOU."