Uniformly servile

re: "The dress code conundrum" (BP, Life, July 26, 2022) 

Dear editor,

The students that way inclined at Chiangmai and Chulalongkorn Universities are right to be proud of their pretty uniforms. Who, after all, would not delight in dressing up in something so cute that publicly boasts of their impressive status? They are very fitting for good children. The proudly uniform wearers are also right that their neatly uniform attire harks back to the glory days of past values to which their dress marks deep obeisance.

But is something that is arguably suitable for school children really fit for those who aspire to mature reflection on issues of importance? The role of any decent university is to foster critical thinking, the questioning of received wisdom, to detect and correct errors, to build on past insights to gain deeper insights. That is what science does if it is to make progress. That is what history does, or must do if it is to better understand our past that made us what we are today. That is what economics and philosophy do, if they are to be more than a rehash of old ways of thinking: we do not read Plato, Kant and Hume merely to learn how insightful thinkers saw things centuries and millennia ago. The CU and CMU students who question the value and the values enshrined in uniforms and all they represent are maturing adults who seek understanding to become better at the business of learning and living well. They demonstrate the academic values that mark a decent university education and the institution itself.

The antique values the sedately coloured uniforms shout out are questioned because they are of questionable value. Sedatively nice and polite, the uniforms impose uniform childishness, and very pretty it is, consistent with retarding the critical questioning essential to identifying and correcting errors. It is perhaps time for Thai universities like CU and CMU to grow up and stop the childishness inherited from past antiquities. 

If they cannot do better than their founders and society a century or more ago, that says something terribly sad about those institutions, and about their values deliberately stuck in a bygone era that should have passed long ago.

 Felix Qui

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on MonthDate, 2022, under the title "Uniformly servile" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2357546/uniformly-servile