answer:I started to answer that if your question is truly about conformity/independent style, the example of school uniforms isn’t a good one, because all clothing is some sort of uniform, identifying you with a group. There is no such thing as true personal style when it comes to clothing. I am the antithesis of the type of parent that you would think would send a child to a parochial school, yet both of mine attended for most of grade school, and when they transferred to public school, one would occasionally wear her uniform to public school. As she put it, “it’s blue, it’s white, it works.” I believe the work of children is to study in school, and uniforms are their work clothes. Much in the same way that I wear “work clothes” to work, and dress differently in the evenings and weekends, the idea that children have “work clothes” for going to school. My children were not in school to “free express,” they were there to learn. They were encouraged to have personal choice and free expression in their off time. School is only once place that you learn, but what you learn there is a foundation for learning elsewhere.