School uniform: A cloth to hide the entrenched inequality within Thai society

Abstract

The economic capital has produced a privilege for the capital holder to access rights and opportunities in society—particularly educational opportunities which enable students from high-income earning families to access quality education. Contrastingly children from low-income and impoverished families have educational disadvantages regarding access to an adequate education. For students who belong to a low-income earning family, parents often must apply for loans, trade valuables, or borrow money from relatives and acquaintances to put their children through the educational system and break the chains of poverty. However, this is just a short-term action to the long-term obstacle as this only allows the child to start their first semester. Financial coercion and hardships are often the reality for these low-income families and their children, as each year, nearly a million Thai children are uneducated. This vast disparity between socioeconomic class and access to education prevails as a fundamental and unresolved dilemma hidden in the Thai educational system. However, Thai society has preferred to conceal students' challenges with access to education by focusing on students' uniforms. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, the student uniform has been perceived to be more than "the four necessities of life" of explanation in Buddhism and "physiological needs". It is not deemed a burden on parents, reinforcing the problems of inequality. Uniforms should not be used to diverse the public from the real issues; Thai society faces, that low-income families do not have the opportunities for suitable education.