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Ria Chakraborty, 15, Lakeville Eastview High School Student

Today, more than ever, the school environment is rich in a diversity that offers students more opportunities to learn. But it also threatens to extinguish any hope for peaceful cooperation among students.

Students today struggle to keep up with one another in the arenas of language, culture, social standing, religion and so on. Peers seem too different, too alien, to relate to on a personal level. Only sets of students who are superficially similar seem able to work together. This leads to the formation of cliques, or small groups bound together by physical or emotional resemblances.

Though created with the intent of producing unity, these cliques only deepen distinctions. No longer is there even the pretense among students of camaraderie. As divisions among students intensify, so do feelings of inferiority among those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. The only sympathy they gain is from others in similar positions. Isolated, they lose out on a valuable opportunity to expand their social horizon and move beyond the social setting in which they have been brought up.

There is, however, a simple solution.

By introducing uniforms to the public-school setting, we would help students be able to meet with peers as never before.

They would be able to disregard differences in clothing, thus shattering a fundamental basis for cliques. This would in turn ease tensions, allowing all students to interact with one another without the barriers of wealth and social standing. Students would then be encouraged to search for deeper traits within others with an open mind.

These are benefits that our private-school counterparts already enjoy. Because the students of a public school tend to come from more varied backgrounds than do students in private schools, the benefits of uniforms would be even more meaningful.

With students in uniforms, a school's sense of identity and unity would be strengthened. Students would revel in the richness of their diversity instead of mistrusting it, as their physical sameness through use of the uniform would serve to always remind them that, in the end, they are all at school for the same purpose: to gain an education.

RIA CHAKRABORTY, 15, LAKEVILLE, EASTVIEW HIGH STUDENT

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/98639764.html