Reddit contains many recurring topic posts on stupid school rules and is a vast library on them, in face of which the authoritarian model of school is completely indefensible. Year round shorts uniforms are regularly mentioned in them, confirming how persistently, while randomly, they have occurred and been a trope. This post, just within the length limit, makes an article itself -
More attention is needed on trauma from the inconsistency of uniforms, the cruelty that what is ideal for you can happen at some other schools and chance not to happen at yours. I'm desperate for some engaging and empathy on this around all year round shorts uniforms for boys. Many folks don't even realise they exist, including me in my boyhood ! but to those who do, by the majority experience of it it's the most astoundingly cruel thing not to get stopped by modern child protection standards even in the paedo paranoia era. But nobody realises this - the opposite cruelty exists too, where by your own metabolic nature you actually like year round shorts, for you those uniforms would suit and not be cruel, but you chance not to get them ! and you get the opposite, a school very against shorts !
For a start, the incredible mix of perceptions shows that at media elite level the system does not care if a thing done quite a lot in some places is not even known of in others. "I've never heard of a school not allowing trousers before." "Didn't think they still existed." "I am horrified to discover this cruel and poncy tradition still exists." "It's not that usual nowadays". But recently on Mumsnet: "it is fairly general for boys to wear short trousers with long socks, as part of their school uniform, up to a certain age. They certainly do, and always have, around my way"
They were never much a thing in South Wales, and throughout my 70s-80s schooldays, before the web, I had no idea they existed. Nor my mother that they still existed, even though she had lived in the mid-century era of boys' knee breeches, she believed any question of shorts in winter had ended with that era. Also she had sanitised it in memory. She told me the breeches and socks were both knee length and practically met and the socks could be turned up, so that it was not shorts in the modern sense of significant bareness. In fact, memories are mixed on that, some posts say the same so was partly right, but other posts express knee cruelty and signifant bareness, So clearly that had come in too, by some time 30s-50s range, and there were dfferent personal bubbles of perception then as now.
I'm autistic with a sensory issue need for shorts, and actually have recognition of this as a need as an adult worker, ever since 2009 starting in the employment support system as it was then under Labour. I have it publicly announced in Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum, Jessica Kingsley 2017, as a human rights precedent against uniforms. Especially against all uniforms that ban shorts. It's entirely down to media elite that it has not been reported as that. I have worn year round as an adult for over 30 years and am deeply bonded with it as my identity. It's physically real that it and all clothes minorities should be another category in identity politics.
But I will never understand how I have been so lucky in adulthood since my awakening to this identity in my 20s, but was so cruelly unlucky with it in every way in childhood.I narrowly missed the breeches era, and I grew up in South Wales, which has a respiratorily irritating damp air climate, which causes catarrh symptoms like a persistent cold. Family had local knowledge of this, mum called it "Cardiff catarrh". It was even the exiled wrong place for me, as I'm Scottish, knee loving stock, not locally adapted to South Wales's air. TV doctor Miriam Stoppard wrote of a Thames Valley catarrh similarly, and air problems in Russia's Volga Basin cities may be a case, problem seems to come from long waterways. Living before the web with no info source on year round shorts, it literally happened to me that I could never discover by myself that they are not harmful and don't make you catch cold, as this unfair nasal climate filled winters with a catching cold feeling !! It is a lifelong wound and heartbreak, that this robbed my childhood of my identity.
Clearly a shorts school uniform would have woken me up to my identity. So think how it feels now to see a consensus online that in the 70s they were still very widespread and even usual, and universal in private schools. No they were not. My autistic early reading lead to a mislabelling as gifted and private school, and I started at Cardiff's Monkton House in 1973, yes 1973, with juniors free to choose our trousers length in an otherwise traditional uniform. Then all needed to wake me up was the proverbial "that one kid at school who always stays in shorts". I never had him. WHY NOT? when posts now tell us there are such great numbers everywhere that every school has hm ! These nasal climates could still rob kids now. Though better access to info on it now the web exists, a child's web access may be oversupervised or prevented by poverty.
At age 7, I had a new classmate heading to be an unwilling year rounder, but yes he was cold, and my puzzled questions may have helped him to assert to his dad to get longs after all by start of winter. Helped him, unknowingly hurt myself.
The news media never discussed shorts uniforms, even when discussed whether to have uniforms at all. So it never showed me they existed, and it never showed the families suffering them that opposite cases existed. There was only one moment when I was puzzled and racked with envy to see 2 schoolboys my age singing carols on Nationwide in shorts. I supposed TV studio warmth must have enabled it. They left us all in our bubbles. Relatives in Edinburgh never had cause to mention that shorts uniforms are prominent there, and we never visited in winter. We were in close touch with a mum's schoolmate's family in Weymouth, and never heard anything of shorts uniforms from their region.
Most terribly anguishing is that I lost my best chance to wake up just because hated football ! That is why I was not a scout. I expressed interest in cubs when a classmate joined, we got as far as trying to contact an organiser, but then my grandma warned, sourced from local talk not cubs themselves, that cubs did football a lot, and persuaded me it made cubs unsuitable. She was my supporter against school football, and some coverage I have seen and online failed experiences of cubs do suggest she was right. But it was a tragedy of losing other good stuff to 1 stupid barrier. Including, family did not know, and the classmate never mentioned because uncool, the cubs had a year round shorts uniform then. I would have loved it and been awakened by it to ask searching questions on year round life's health safety. That I only discovered it years later was devastating. It exactly appealed to sensitive soft boys like me, not to rough footballing boys !
This could be all the difference between waking up at 8 or in my 20s !And it still gets worse, as terrible a wrong turn as in the Doctor Who story Turn Left. It would have averted, that 8 was exactly when I was placed in a greedy overambitious advance streaming school, with fee helpers until I became a scholarship boy, that would end disastrously in a pressure horror and breakdown at 14. Balfour House, whose discredited closure I was a key cause of. If I was awake to shorts I would have known from start Balfour was bad, never have believed in it or agreed to go there. For its businesslike gloom included it did not allow shorts at all above the first primary year after infants class. Boys' uniform was a black suit. It did not allow us to go home in PE kits even on hot afternoons. It's a mercy it did not allow mini-skirts and allowed the girls woolly tights: anti-leg across genders. Think how it feels to read of others getting shorts uniforms to 12 or 13, while I got that. And in a 70s right wing private school.
At age 10, I tested the feel of staying in shorts at home all through Oct, it was beautiful, and I longed to continue the untroubledness into Nov. The nasal climate did its work, grim clarity that year round shorts was an impossible dream that could not exist. This could happen even to a kid in the city the Prime Minister was an MP for, James Callaghan.
At age 14 in adolescent unit, there was a girl there who experimented with bare legs for a few days of early winter, spotted my reaction, and guessed right I might like to be in shorts and suggested it, and mentioned having a cousin inclined thus. But she did not say he did it year round, nor arrange for me to learn from him. The unit was a medical institution and part of the health service, and its team included Welsh writer Harri Pritchard-Jones, dad of Boris Johnson associate Guto Harri. The unit did not inform us that year round shorts was a safe okay choice that would not harm health. So that moment was lost too, and for that girl too, whose own testing it ended after that and she just went into jeans, as if she had been trying to find it out for herself too and let down by the unit too.
Now think of a horrific catch 22 vicious circle, my nose may have played up more because longs discomfort. For after I found my identity and started year round shorts in my 20s, my respiratory health actually felt improved and less catarrhal ! even when still living in Cardiff.
Maurice Frank2 Feb 2024
