Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: a last-minute topic switch, sparked by a post about school dress codes, sends the room down a genuinely rich rabbit hole — what does a uniform actually do to power? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Marc, Sabine and Jürgen pull the word apart piece by piece: airline uniforms introduced in the ’90s specifically to calm unruly passengers, the school-uniform case for and against (as protection from brand-name bullying versus Marc’s fierce individualist objection to it), and Jürgen’s insistence on a sharp distinction that runs through the whole conversation — a uniform, he argues, is fundamentally a symbol of authority, not power, right up until the moment someone’s will gets overridden by it. The room also lands on his closing line, borrowed and extended from Gottfried Keller: clothes make the man, but never the character.
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
The host opened with a quick change of plans: she’d announced the day before that today’s room would continue with power in pop culture, but a post from Jürgen about uniforms and school dress caught her attention, so the room switched topics on short notice to talk about power and uniform instead. The question on the table: what influence do uniforms actually have on power? She was genuinely curious where the exchange would go and how the room would shape it together. As always, everyone was warmly invited to join and share their first impulses — power and uniform, what comes to mind, in what direction could this be taken, and had anyone had direct experience with it themselves? As a quick reminder for anyone joining for the first time, the room is recorded throughout, so joining counts as agreeing to it being published afterward. Three small room rules: a profile photo you can be recognized in, a first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio. Anyone who’d rather not, or wants to stay anonymous, is welcome to use the chat instead.
Sabine kicked things off: she’d actually expected a man to speak first, since “uniform” tends to conjure up images of the military or similar. But then she thought about it more — no matter where you travel, say flying into America and handing over your passport, there’s always a border official in uniform, and there’s always that instinct to stand up straight, not say anything wrong, not smile too much, keep things serious. So the uniform’s salesperson, so to speak, has already half done its job. Or getting pulled over for speeding and having uniformed officers approach the car — she remembered being in America once, nearly trembling as they approached, being told “no, no, stay in the car, stay in the car,” and thinking, what just happened? All they’d wanted was for her to stay put and show ID, but she was already on edge. She suspected if someone without a uniform had approached, it would have felt entirely different. That was her opening thought.
Wonderful, the host said — and that raises the first real question: where do we actually encounter this? Where do uniforms show up? A few things had already been named; she’d add ground staff at airports, with different airlines having different uniforms, then civil servants, police as already mentioned, hotel staff, possibly restaurant staff, and depending on the country, schools too. Those were just the first things that came to mind — maybe others would think of more. And then it’s worth looking at function: is it different in the private sector versus the state sector, say police versus, say, hospitality? That might be an interesting angle too. Marc, good morning — wanted to jump in?
Good morning to the room, Marc said, picking up on the flight-crew point. He works a lot with fashion, and there’s actually a real logic behind airline uniforms. In the ’90s, some airlines had real problems with drunk or unruly passengers, and — he couldn’t recall which airline exactly — some introduced uniforms with gold stripes on the sleeves specifically to project more authority. And it actually worked: passengers behaved more calmly. If he remembered right, the captain still wears a cap today too, because it’s literally about who’s wearing the hat being the one in charge. That was his contribution on fashion and uniform.
Genuinely fascinating, the host said — and the captain wearing the cap, absolutely. And there’s also a distinction made through the stripes: with flight crew, the number of stripes signals whether someone is regular cabin crew or a purser, say, and the captain has a different stripe count from regular crew too, right down to the cap itself. Which brings up the topic of insignia and badges more broadly. There was also a chat addition from Vera about marching bands and choirs, which also present a kind of uniform appearance. Sabine, anything to add?
On children and schools, Sabine said: Germany doesn’t have school uniforms, but in countries that do, there’s a real uniformity to it — the kids all look alike, they stand up a little straighter, there’s more discipline to it, partly just from everyone wearing the same thing. And she thought it cuts both ways — if everyone’s already wearing the uniform, nobody has to think in the morning about which logo needs to be on their T-shirt to be the coolest kid. Everyone’s equal, which is worth something too. She’d also wanted to say something about the German military but had lost the thought — she’d come back to it.
The host added the fire department to the list, another classic uniform example — there are actually plenty of cases like this, more common than you’d think. And on Sabine’s point about kids not having to think in the morning, she could confirm it herself: having worked for an airline for years, it was a genuine relief not having to think about what to wear on a given shift — you just grabbed something clean from the closet, no decisions needed. She also knew, from Turkey specifically, that some schools there have uniforms, and the original reasoning was partly about avoiding visible differences between families — some can afford certain clothes for their children, others can’t — so it’s not just about reducing morning decision fatigue, but about not letting social differences become visible, with the uniform creating that equality. The underlying idea in Turkey being that you wouldn’t have some kids showing up in expensive shoes and others in worn-out ones. She found that a genuinely interesting thought behind it. Marc, Sabine, anything to add?
Marc picked that thread up: “uniform” literally means “of one form,” uniform — something Jürgen always pushes the room to examine, the actual words we use. Everything the host had said, he could underline. His first association with “uniform” was clothing you put on, but then he thought of students, of school uniforms, and of how uniform daily school life already is today in other ways. Wearing a uniform also means belonging to a group — that’s exactly why soldiers wear one, so you don’t accidentally shoot your own comrade. But a uniform isn’t only about clothing — he went to school himself, and there are indirect pressures too, exactly what the host had just described: wearing the right sneakers, having the right phone brand, and so on. That’s a kind of uniforming too, not expressed through clothing per se, but through objects you have, or are expected to have, or that others decide you should be using. Which raises the question: beyond clothing, what else counts as this kind of leveling? And a second question that occurred to him: is a sports jersey actually a form of uniform too? Or is it something different — why does it get a different name at all? Maybe worth looking at too.
Someone wanted to add a point about what makes children equal: a lot of charitable donations now go toward building new schools in developing countries, and when you see the small children marching into school looking sharp, all dressed alike, and then in the afternoon playing in the dirt, sometimes with barely anything on — that clearly does something. So there’s a certain standard, a certain standing to it. And that connects to what Marc said earlier — the one wearing the hat is the boss. Especially in the military, how many stars on your shoulder really matters, and pursuing that career path is tied directly to earning one more star — suddenly everyone listens to you because you have the star, whether or not you’re actually the smartest person in the room, but you’ve got the star regardless.
Absolutely, the host said — and the combination of uniform and insignia is often exactly where hierarchies become visible, marking a person’s position within a group. Genuinely interesting. Marc, anything more?
Marc had something on clothing and politics too, which he found fascinating to observe: when women climbed the career ladder in companies, they used to adapt to the men — men wore suits, women wore matching skirt-suits. Lately he’s noticed more and more that when women in politics appear on TV, they’re no longer wearing those skirt-suits, but it’s now accepted, even encouraged, to emphasize femininity again — it’s become legitimate to show up in a dress. And ultimately that’s also a form of uniforming. Clothing, thought of as uniform, as “of one form,” can of course be used to distract too — it can exert power, but it can also be used to blend in, a kind of uniforming meant to avoid standing out too much. Either way, clothing definitely has an effect on us, whether it’s a classic military uniform, a service uniform, or work attire.
Worth looking at further, the host said — while Marc was talking, the word “dress code” immediately popped into her head, since she wouldn’t classify a skirt-suit or a dress as a uniform exactly, but it does fall under what he’d just described, under the umbrella of dress code — how one dresses, which comes up in plenty of contexts too, insurance companies, banks and the like, where there’s no classic uniform, meaning everyone is technically free to choose what they wear, it’s not identical, but there is a dress code — you’d rarely see a man or woman show up there in sweatpants. Sabine, anything to add?
Sabine wanted to add that maybe this is also, in a way, a woman’s weapon. If you look at Annalena Baerbock in politics, showing up somewhere surrounded by three, four, five men all in conservative suits, and she’s wearing a colorful little dress — where does everyone’s eye go? Probably the men’s more than hers, but that is, in a sense, a disempowering of the uniform, because attention gets pulled elsewhere. Which of course raises the reverse question too: can I just get dressed simply, or do I have to check the closet three times, wondering how everyone else will be dressed, what the occasion calls for? They’d just had the summer party for the chamber of commerce, where everyone would normally show up in suits — but then a last-minute email came through saying dress a bit more casually, and it was even mentioned in a speech that they’d dressed a bit differently today. She found that a bit over the top, since she was dressed exactly as she always would be. But for men, it clearly makes a bigger difference — suddenly the tie comes off, the suit jacket comes off, someone shows up in a polo shirt instead, and that really changes something.
Marc had sent a little heart and wanted to add something: there’s an explanation for that too, tied to the old saying about needing to “fill out” your role as a man. In politics, and elsewhere, women presenting themselves in a dress has something to do with being allowed to show their femininity more, and women feeling less afraid that doing so will cost them authority. Because — sticking with the word “uniform” — for him it doesn’t conjure a classic military or suit uniform, but rather “homogeneous” and “unified.” And the shift in dress style has to do with exactly what Sabine described: fear, professionally, of not being taken seriously, because in insurance, in politics, you present yourself accordingly — and women already have a harder standing, as discussed the day before, since well over 87% of professions are still male-dominated, so it’s only natural women think harder about what they wear. But he thinks it’s a good thing that respect or authority earned isn’t tied exclusively to uniform, homogeneous dress — a woman is allowed to look feminine, and that says nothing about her competence or ability to do her job.
The host found this genuinely fascinating, because a uniform in the original sense really is something fully unified — she’d actually draw a distinction between dress code and uniform. Maybe dress code is a kind of modern evolution of the uniform concept, originating from that same underlying idea, but a dress code still has something to do with a certain leveling, a certain uniformity, while still allowing variation in combinations, in colors and so on. So it’s not a one-to-one match with the classic uniform. How did the others see it?
Sabine agreed fully: dressing uniformly always ties to the occasion, while a classic uniform ties more to where you’re going, what the job is — a bit of surveillance, and thus back to power, our original topic. And she’d noticed something in sports too — team uniforms have a lot to do with money these days. A small football club buying new jerseys every year needs sponsors now, because it’s simply not affordable otherwise. So money comes into it too, and when teams face off, there’s the question of whose jersey looks better.
Marc wanted to draw a distinction too: a suit in politics looks uniform, he fully agreed with the host there, but it isn’t actually a uniform in the strict sense, because a uniform means truly identical, uniform equals identical. To understand it better: if he were in the military, they couldn’t just say “we all wear green” and let him show up in whatever green shirt he owns — no sweatshirts, no random T-shirts, everyone wears the exact same T-shirt, the exact same sweatshirt, the exact same jacket, no variation allowed. Whereas if five men in politics stand next to each other in black or gray suits, those are different brands, different buttons — it looks uniform, but it isn’t actually a uniform in that strict sense. He fully agreed with the host there.
Wonderful, the host said — and team sports are a great example to look at more closely here. It’s also a distinction of belonging, being able to tell team A from team B clearly. And that doesn’t stop with the team itself — the fans dress accordingly too, matching colors even if not identically, so you can usually tell right away which side someone supports in the stadium. So, looking at function — what is the actual function of a uniform, and what effect does it have?
Whole industries live off exactly that function, one participant said — uniform clothing, or a shared jersey, strengthens team spirit. It doesn’t just help you instantly recognize a teammate, it’s also a marker, both from the outside and within the team, immediately recognizing your own teammates, which strengthens team spirit because everyone is wearing the same thing, playing on the same team.
Sabine wanted to add one line before Jürgen joined: imagine a team of six players running around in eleven different jerseys — that just wouldn’t work. Everyone has to be pulling in one direction.
Especially in one direction, exactly, the host agreed. Jürgen, good morning — what did he think?
Good morning to the host and everyone in the room, Jürgen said. He wanted to try pulling together what had been said so far. Since the original spark — and thanks again to the host for that — had been about school uniforms, and he’d already stuck his neck out earlier saying he was, for very specific reasons, in favor of school uniforms, and not just for students but for teachers too. That might become its own thread later, but he wanted to set it aside for now and address the question of function directly. He sees a uniform’s function not only in how it affects others — which is mostly what had been discussed so far — but also in what it does to the person wearing it, how it acts back on the wearer themselves. The host had already touched on this: first, there’s the aspect of belonging, of identity, a marker of identity, whether formed as a team or a company. A good example is flight crews, or ship crews. And in most cases, at a certain training level or rank, the uniform also displays a ranking — through stripes, stars, rank insignia — which is really just the uniform signaling someone’s position within a hierarchy. He’d consider these two the essential functions of a uniform — if he, as a business owner, were considering whether to identify with or against competitors through clothing, through a uniform, it would be exactly because it makes both of those functions visible externally: I belong, and I hold a certain position. In a football or handball team, that rank marker also exists, at minimum through the captain’s armband. So both functions hold true within a team’s jersey as well. And, as with everything, it’s not just about how a uniform’s function affects an outside observer — Sabine had described that effect very aptly — when someone in uniform appears, he suspected, addressing the host directly, there are specific neural pathways that instantly communicate to us: behind this uniform isn’t just person XY, but — and he was deliberately avoiding the word “power” here — a certain authority. They’d already drawn that terminological distinction before. So the appearance of a uniform, and the motivation behind it, should always be seen from these two sides, each carrying both advantages and disadvantages on both ends — but maybe they’d get to that, in connection with school uniforms too. That was his opening thought. Thanks for listening.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — and yes, they’d absolutely come back to pros and cons, and to school uniforms specifically. She wanted to pick up something from the chat too — a participant had noted that in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in Afghanistan under the Islamic Emirate, women are veiled in burqas, which is also, in a sense, a form of uniforming. She admitted she hadn’t thought of that at all spontaneously, but thinking it through, it does carry that same quality of uniformity, applied to a larger group — women, in that context — but ultimately it is a kind of enforced uniformity too. And she found several of Jürgen’s points fascinating: the external effect on one hand, and on the other, what wearing a uniform does to the wearer themselves — aspects like identity. And it’s worth underlining that this partly taps directly into how our brains work, through recognition. Classically speaking, a very young child who can’t yet place what a uniform even means won’t show the same reaction as a teenager or adult who can already categorize the uniform. So it also depends on that. What we culturally associate with a uniform can differ by country too — she knew, for instance, that a police uniform carries a different cultural weight in Turkey than it does in Germany. In Turkey it’s tied more to fear, whereas in Germany it’s historically been built up more, especially through PR, as “friend and helper,” something the police have actively worked toward over recent decades. So, depending on how we were socialized, there are real differences even within specific professional groups. And it’s not only about that authority aspect, but also about categorization and orientation — someone wearing a uniform already stored in our mental categories helps us orient instantly. The room had touched before on how anything that gives us orientation acts as a kind of support, letting us recognize, place, and handle things quickly. Anyone want to add to that, Sabine, Marc, Jürgen?
Sabine went first, with three more examples that had come to mind. First, prison — you essentially surrender your identity there. When someone like Boris Becker, or Markus Braun from Wirecard, goes to prison, they strip off everything and are given a uniform, becoming one of many. Word gets around quickly who’s who, of course, but initially you’re identity-less, just a number. Second, something she’d noticed a lot lately: startups trying to sell their own personal branding often show up in logo T-shirts — so everyone ends up wearing the same shirt there too, boss included, no different from staff — the identity theme again. And third, the church came to mind — given all the current issues facing the Catholic Church, that gets projected onto the institution as a whole: “oh, that’s the church, they’ve got problems,” painting everyone with the same brush.
Jürgen picked up next: he wanted to step back to the earlier chat comment about burqas, which he thought was genuinely central to the room’s actual theme, power and uniform. In his understanding, a uniform isn’t inherently, directly tied to power — it’s very often tied to authority instead, a term the host had used in her own reply to that comment, and he wasn’t going to let that distinction go, since it’s one they’d discussed several times before and it matters a great deal. That said, he was fully with the point being made: that is the dark side of a uniform, the moment it becomes an instrument of power. When, against the will of most women, without their consent, and on the basis of legally imposed authority, someone’s will is being overridden — that is when a uniform connects to power. A police officer connects to authority. So do the robes of judges, which are themselves ranked — constitutional court judges wear red robes, uniquely, versus the black robes of other judges. In his view, these uniforms represent authority, not power, because they’re legitimized by parliamentary decision establishing the judiciary in that form. He found that chat comment genuinely central to the room’s real question: how connected is uniform to power?
Thank you so much, the host said — and she wanted to add another thought to sit with. Saying something happens “against someone’s will” or “without consent” is sometimes genuinely murky. They’d touched on unconscious bias before — clearly, if you introduce something in a country where it wasn’t previously worn at all, you can reasonably call that against people’s will or without consent. But what about when people grow up somewhere certain things are simply considered normal, never questioned? What even counts as free will there, in quotes? As perhaps an extreme example, not classically thought of as a “uniform” at all, but where cultural or societal power still plays a role: girls wearing pink, boys wearing blue, women having long hair — starting from a very young age — or dresses for girls. In a sense, that’s also a kind of uniforming, a dress code nobody questions. Can we call that “against someone’s will”? Probably not — people do it willingly. But is it actually “free will”? Because in a real sense, many people never engage with it or question it at all, simply because it feels so self-evident. She was curious what the others thought.
Jürgen responded: he shared the host’s concerns, and agreed they were aligned on needing a strict, sharp definition of these terms — whether it’s about will, or about power as distinct from influence, they’d found repeatedly that there’s real range and perspective involved, even in a topic like education and intelligence, depending on someone’s own background and level of education, in how these terms get interpreted. But in connection with power, and whether something is truly one’s free will, he thought one further essential component comes into play: the instruments available to enforce that power. And there, he thought, he was fully aligned with the host’s thinking: it can no longer be called free will if I know that resisting has consequences up to and including the scaffold — that’s a fundamentally different situation from, say, facing mild social disapproval here for not putting my daughter in a pink dress. So he thought this comes down to individual case evaluation, specifically regarding the actual consequences involved, which is really what defines power in each instance. For him, this is a topic that resists any general, blanket position — it genuinely has to be judged case by case. That was his view.
Completely understandable, the host said — and it reminded her of a story she’d shared before about her son Elias, who once told her, a few years back, that he’d like to wear dresses. That’s difficult for a boy, because even as a child, he has to think through the consequences — namely, social exclusion. She was curious how the others saw it — she genuinely found it a fascinating, fascinating topic. In principle she agreed with Jürgen. Sabine, Marc, Jürgen, thoughts?
Silence for a moment. Then: it depends on the country, someone said — thinking of a trip to Dubai, where, given the heat, men actually wear long robes too. Whether you’d classify that as a “dress” in the classic sense is debatable, but there are definitely countries where men wear something dress-like. And given Germany might be heading toward 40-degree summers as the new normal, maybe in a few years it’ll be perfectly ordinary to see men walking around in dresses here too, simply because the heat — say, in Cologne — would otherwise be unbearable.
Thank you so much, the host said. Sabine, go ahead.
There was a brief audio hiccup, and Sabine had to repeat herself: with the dress example, if a boy wears one to school or kindergarten, everyone will definitely stare at first. But isn’t that also just trendsetting? Every designer shows up at some point with something nobody wore the day before — people stare first, and then suddenly everyone’s wearing it. So from that angle, if you want to set a trend, you do have to be somewhat different first. The real question is just how much difference society actually tolerates before it says, no, that’s too far outside the norm, and excludes you for it.
Thank you so much, the host said — she didn’t think they’d land on a conclusive answer here, but it felt important to plant that thought regardless, to give everyone something to sit with. She suggested using the rest of the time to look at pros and cons, and to circle back to Jürgen’s point about school uniforms — not just for students, but for teachers too. What did people think? Marc, did he want to add something?
Marc had a good answer for Elias that had just occurred to him: if he’d had the courage — which he thought would be genuinely wonderful, since he used to do things like that himself — to show up to school today as a boy in a dress and gotten teased for it, his answer would have been simple: “yes, because I’m allowed to.” He’d have loved to see the other kids’ faces. That would have shut the whole thing down right there. It always comes down to the right response and the right inner attitude, he said — and to the courage to try new things.
The host had used the moment to google with Elias and show him that Scottish men also wear kilts, essentially skirts, which left him genuinely amazed. So there are always ways to be resourceful and creative about it, ways to handle it without simply telling a child “you’re not allowed to do that.” But it does require thinking around corners, which she found genuinely fascinating.
Back to pros and cons, and school uniforms — what did people want to bring in?
Marc said if school uniforms had been introduced back when he was a student, he wouldn’t have liked it, because he valued, and still values, being able to stand out through his clothing, to be deliberately non-uniform, to stand out from the crowd rather than blend in. On the other hand, now that he’s a parent himself, he might actually welcome school uniforms today — because, as the host had touched on, in Germany there are plenty of people who can’t even manage to save fifty euros a month, whose money is simply gone by the end of the month, and the pressure that exists everywhere today around having the right phone, the right school bag and so on could genuinely relieve a lot of parents, while also freeing children from having to justify not wearing certain brands. So from the standpoint of leveling and of relief — and what it means for a child to feel excluded from a group for not wearing the right brand — that peer pressure and bullying is so intense today, far beyond what existed in his own school years. That would be new grounds, for him, to reconsider school uniforms, even though he was personally glad not to have had them — it was lovely for him at the time, but as they’d said, we’re meant to learn by looking back, and the pressure today is bigger and different, which calls for fresh thinking about what’s right today, not just what felt nice back then.
Sabine said she was genuinely torn. On one hand, all eyes are naturally on the teacher, so it’s also a question of authority — what the teacher wears today, how they look, whether they wear a dress or not, everyone watches that symbolically. Back when teachers still carried a cane, that was very much a matter of authority too — maybe a uniform for teachers would add a bit more authority. Against that, though, is that school is meant to be somewhat more liberal, and she wasn’t sure a uniform standing at the front of the class would actually help, since that again demonstrates power. So there’s a case on both sides, she said — personally she’d lean against it. And with that she had to sign off, since breakfast was on the table — she’d keep listening, though. Thanks, and happy Sunday — oh wait, it’s only Saturday today.
Thank you so much, the host said, enjoy your breakfast — and that raises a real question: does a uniform always have to symbolize power? If, say, the uniform for students and teachers were identical, wouldn’t that actually rule out that whole idea of power symbolism? That could be an interesting question to debate further. Marc, Jürgen, thoughts?
Jürgen pressed his point again, firmly: for him, a uniform is, if anything, only indirectly a symbol of power — it’s a symbol of authority. And he wouldn’t budge from that unless someone could convince him that isn’t the underlying purpose of a uniform, given its two functions, which he’d repeat: simplifying belonging, identity, on one hand, and hierarchy on the other — a hierarchy arising from clearly defined competencies. That’s exactly why a teacher would wear a different uniform — to mark that they occupy a different position in the hierarchy, within the process of imparting knowledge and education, than a trainee or student does. But directly tying that to a position of power would run completely counter to any educational mission. That was what Sabine had touched on earlier with the instrument — the cane, which he still remembered painfully, that teachers used to carry around. That was an instrument of power. But what is school actually about? It’s about the authority to pass on and transmit knowledge and education. Which is exactly why he was so insistent on this distinction between authority and power, and why he wanted that carried consistently into their concrete example of school uniforms — logically, consistently applied not only to students but to instructors and teachers as well.
The host picked up the thread: to make it clearer, take the police as another example — it does connect partly to authority or hierarchy, through stripes or their absence, badges or their absence, and so on. A certain power does arise from position, and that power can be abused. And yet, on the other hand, they’d already seen examples in other rooms of teachers exercising their position or power without any uniform at all. So the real question is: does power actually go hand in hand with the uniform automatically? Isn’t it, ultimately, much more about the person’s own character and attitude? Maybe it isn’t the uniform doing that at all — question mark. What did people think?
If he could answer that directly, Jürgen said, then — as with many other subjects — you have to plainly recognize that the saying “clothes make the man” can, in his view, only really refer to the external effect the wearer has on the observer perceiving them. He believed, and hoped, that whoever wrote that famous line meant exactly this: clothes make the man, but clothes don’t make character. Someone wearing a police uniform gives him no guarantee whatsoever against abuse of that position — and the same holds for every other field too, sorry to bring this up, but the same is true of someone wearing a doctor’s coat. If that person has a disruptive, negative character, they have exactly the same opportunity to abuse the externally worn identity a uniform provides. He didn’t see it any differently there.
Marc, anything to add?
Marc said he was still turning it over, since Jürgen had connected power and uniform quite strongly — but thinking back to his own time in the German military, in his unit, power wasn’t actually exercised through the uniform itself, or the rank insignia as such — though through the rank insignia, through the badge, he could tell what standing someone held. And in the earlier discussion about introducing uniform dress in a professional setting, the team spirit would always take priority for him — he’d switch companies immediately, or simply wouldn’t enjoy it, if there were different uniforms letting you instantly identify who works in production versus who’s a department head versus who’s in management, with different dress forms signaling exactly what power each person holds. He didn’t think he’d feel comfortable with that. As a team concept — we’re unified, one team, one jersey, one squad — he liked that just fine. And that was exactly his concern, Jürgen, maybe he’d misunderstood, about school: everyone dressing identically, all teachers dressed the same, he could absolutely picture that. But if it expressed power — if there were also different rank insignia depending on which teacher he was, which subject he taught, with different uniforms accordingly — that would remind him too strongly of the military, or the police. He had nothing against uniform dress as such, only if the uniform, as described, is meant to express power within that structure — then he personally struggles, because that would mean subordinating himself again, and as an individualist he has real trouble with that kind of setup.
Jürgen clarified: he must have expressed himself badly, because he meant exactly the opposite — if anything, he was making the case that a uniform is, at root, an expression of authority for him, not power, though authority can certainly take on a power dynamic; but not every form of authority is power. That ties back to how we define power versus what we understand as authority. But it was really the opposite of what Marc had understood — and regarding rank insignia for teachers specifically, he fully agreed with Marc, that was never his intention. His point, in proposing school uniforms — and again, not just for students but for teachers too — was that the very act of uniforming, whether or not it includes some distinguishing mark, establishes an identity: that students and teachers belong together, that we’re talking about the identity of an educational community, so to speak, and the feeling of belonging to it, in whatever role. From there he arrived at looking at the whole thing not from outside — how does it affect us as observers — but at what it actually does for the people directly involved. He didn’t think they needed to go into detail about what it means to have a certain protective function and a built-in sense of being taken care of through belonging, in order to feel at ease there, and not be exposed to envy or mockery over a slightly different social status, because you no longer fit the style — and here he was speaking about how that shows up in the specific ad that had originally sparked this whole topic for him, because the style already stops fitting from the very first day of school. And, from head to toe — the host had responded to this immediately, which he found very apt — that naturally includes the hairclip, the sunglasses worn, and then looking down at the feet, which shoes you’re wearing has apparently become a classification criterion among teenagers today. And in his view, that is not conducive at all to a complex sense of belonging within an educational community, if that’s baked in from the start, or already leads to an internal classification system. That was his underlying concern. Thanks.
Wonderful, thank you so much, the host said — she wanted to add two or three sentences on the team belonging idea too. She thought both aspects genuinely apply here. On one hand, everything just described — belonging, a protective function, feeling taken care of and so on — are genuinely positive sides of a uniform, which would likely ease things considerably around social differences and similar issues in many contexts. And, by the way, not only around clothing — things like phone bans at school are exactly this same kind of discussion, and rightly so, in her view. At the same time, since they’d agreed to talk pros and cons, there’s the other side too: whoever isn’t wearing the uniform is automatically outside that sense of belonging. We know this from football matches or similar — when two people wearing different jerseys or uniforms end up in conflict, you can suddenly and instantly see movements shift, regardless of whether these people even know each other, simply because they identify with a certain belonging and immediately take sides. Those, then, are the disadvantages. Which means you’d have to think further: if you’re proposing uniforms, should it not just be school-specific, but consistent across an entire federal state, or even across all of Germany, precisely so there’s no distinction visible between students, even when they’re using public transport, say, and wearing different school uniforms otherwise? So there are clearly both positive and negative aspects to a uniform, and you can look at it from various angles and think through whether and to what extent it’s genuinely sensible. Historically, uniforms have also often led to escalation, or extreme situations arising from them. And here too, looking at it neurologically, processes and automatic mechanisms in the brain make it genuinely difficult to consciously push back against, since we don’t always have control over them. So both perspectives feel justified to her — there’s something to the positive side, and there are real disadvantages too. Which brings things back, as ever, to that lovely phrase Jürgen used: clothes make the man, but not the character. Which means, at the end of the day, it comes down to those same fundamental questions — how do we treat each other, what attitude do we hold, how do we meet each other as people — which clearly plays an enormous, genuinely important role here too. With that, she suggested moving into the closing round, giving everyone the chance to add a final thought and name their highlight from today’s room. Jürgen, go ahead.
Thank you, Jürgen said — sorry, Marc, for jumping ahead in the closing order, but he wanted to gratefully pick up the host’s summary. As with so many other topics, he found himself once again in that position of weighing positive against negative — that’s simply unavoidable, and he sees that as a good thing, because it’s exactly through that contrast of pro and con, protagonist and antagonist, that we change and grow — that’s a firm belief of his, and fundamentally shapes who we are as beings. That was his first point. His second: it’s worth being clear that a uniform, in itself, doesn’t do anything — what he means is that the purpose behind introducing a uniform, say in a school, needs to be clearly defined as a purpose that leads to an outcome that wouldn’t result from not having a uniform at all. A simple example, unrelated to school, picking up Sabine’s earlier point: if a police officer weren’t recognizable as a police officer and stopped him on the street — he said “him” deliberately — his own willingness to comply, to actually stop, would be quite limited. That was just something he wanted to add: weighing pro and con, and grounding it in purpose — why at all, and does it actually achieve more than we’d achieve without the uniform? A genuinely lovely and rich topic, and thanks again for the spontaneous switch to make this today’s room theme. He wished everyone a good weekend, and thanked them for the chance to share his thoughts.
Wonderful, thank you so much. Marc?
Marc said it was interesting to watch his own reaction as he listened. He underlined what Jürgen had said, and genuinely liked the word “belonging.” At the same time, all his hackles rose imagining that people could immediately tell he’s from North Rhine-Westphalia, belonging, all students equal, immediately identifiable as tied to that particular state — and he realized he’s simply too individualistic; he can follow the underlying logic and every argument for it, but he still personally prefers variety, for the market and for himself, prefers difference, and struggles a great deal with uniforming when it comes to school specifically and to leveling everyone out. Though “belonging” really is a wonderful word, and a wonderful idea.
Wonderful, the host said, thank you so much — and this brings back an earlier aspect too: the moment a school introduces a uniform requirement, that also means, conversely, children no longer get to freely choose whether to wear one or not. Which brings them right back to that question of legitimacy again. A genuinely fascinating topic, she thought, and heartfelt thanks for the many different perspectives they’d opened up on it today. Worth letting it sit for a while and seeing where everyone actually stands, whether positions shift, or whether there’s even a clear position to hold at all — she suspected that’s not an easy question to answer in parts. She was genuinely glad they’d picked up this post and switched topics spontaneously, and it fit beautifully with tomorrow’s room too, continuing with the authors’ breakfast featuring Zeus, on body language on the go, which also touches on signaling effects and similar themes. She was already looking forward to welcoming everyone back tomorrow morning at 8am under the Bestselling Authors theme, for anyone with the time and interest to join. It would surely be genuinely fascinating, and she looked forward to whatever the room would discover together and whatever exchange would follow. With that, she wished everyone a wonderful Saturday and looked forward to tomorrow morning. Until then, ciao!
