Dress codes have been a part of society for centuries. Love them or hate them, they do serve a purpose, and in the United States, for example, it’s hard to find a school that doesn’t have one for its students or a business that doesn’t have one for its employees. Some are more strict than others, but there are usually rules about what you can and can’t wear in public when you’re participating in an organized group.
Back in the 1996, during a speech about gangs and violence in public schools, President Bill Clinton suggested that school uniforms were one potential way to break the “cycle of violence, truancy, and disorder by helping young students to understand that what really counts is what kind of people they are, what’s on the inside, to remember that what they’re doing at school is working, not showing off their own clothes or envying another student’s clothes.”
He said that the federal government would not mandate it; it was merely a suggestion for parents, teachers, and local school districts. Several schools adopted this policy following his speech, and the results were overwhelmingly positive.
In 2013, researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno College of Education studied middle schools where students wore uniforms and found that “school police data showed a 63% reduction in police log reports during the first year of implementation” of the uniform policy.
The highly-rated Royal Public Schools in Texas claim that uniforms lead to behavior improvements, a sense of unity, improved academic performance, and preparation for the professional world. The school also claims that “Another safety-related benefit is the reduction of gang influence. Uniforms make it difficult for gang members to display their affiliations through clothing, colors, or symbols, thus minimizing the likelihood of gang-related conflicts on school grounds.” (emphasis added)
Which leads me to El Salvador. Earlier this week, the country’s minister of education, Karla Trigueros, announced that Salvadoran school principals must greet students at school entrances each day and ensure they have a clean uniform, a proper haircut, and a proper personal presentation, and they must offer a respectful greeting.
Este día envié este memorándum para todos los directores de escuelas e institutos a nivel nacional, para que asuman su rol como modelos de orden y disciplina para nuestros estudiantes.
Las medidas serán efectivas a partir de este miércoles 20 de agosto. pic.twitter.com/iALhQF7z1M
— Karla Trigueros (@KarlaETrigueros) August 18, 2025
It appears that students who do not follow the rules may receive disciplinary action. And while the notice doesn’t seem to specify this information, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele reposted something on X that indicated that students are no longer allowed to wear certain hairstyles that are often affiliated with gang membership and culture, specifically the “Edgar cut.”
El Salvador has officially banned the “Edgar” haircut in its public schools.
The country’s new Minister of Education requires each student to have a clean uniform, formal haircut and mandatory greeting of teachers and principal upon entering the school. pic.twitter.com/8uqHIV8tcx
— Salvadoran Pride (@SalvadoranPride) August 21, 2025
Some in the mainstream media and many armchair geopolitical experts have taken to their keyboards to express their disgust with this idea. How dare this country’s government require the students to wear uniforms? (Fun fact: These kids have been wearing uniforms for decades; it just hasn’t been enforced like this in recent years.)
Reuters even managed to find one teachers’ organization that doesn’t seem to like Trigueros because of her military background (along with a nudge-nudge wink-wink line hinting at Bukele becoming some sort of dictator), but many of the country’s educators, parents, and students seemed to have welcomed her with open arms. There are numerous random videos and photos on X of the locals treating her like a hero. Bukele posted some of them to his account yesterday, but there are many more if you dig a little deeper.
La militarización que dicen los opositores. pic.twitter.com/ZrBAdj9Bdw
— Anonimo.sv (@AnonimoSV503) August 21, 2025
And here’s Óscar Melara, director of El Salvador’s National Technical Industrial Institute, singing her praises because she’s “restoring order and discipline” to the students. (Just FYI, it’s in Spanish. Actually, most of my research here was in Spanish, and I speak Duolingo Spanglish at best, so please bear with me if I miss a detail or two — the point is still the same.)
🇸🇻🏫 EL ORDEN Y LA DISCIPLINA REGRESAN A LAS AULAS
Óscar Melara, director del Instituto Nacional Técnico Industrial, afirmó que, con el apoyo de la ministra de @EducacionSV, @KarlaETrigueros, se ha logrado restablecer el orden y la disciplina entre los alumnos de la institución.… pic.twitter.com/RVZ0YQTeKb
— Diario La Huella (@LaHuellaSV) August 21, 2025
As I said, many of the Salvadoran people welcome the tightening of educational standards — at least from what I read online, both via media outlets and social media posts — while most of the ones who are arguing against it do not actually live in El Salvador. They’re right here in the United States. I would venture to guess that they’re some of the same people posting with their green hair and 38 piercings in their face about how hard it is to find a job because of Donald Trump or something, but I digress.
Which leads me to my next point. Earlier this week, University of Colorado Boulder’s head football coach, Deion Sanders, went viral when a video of him talking to his own players about their in-class dress code hit social media. Sanders told his players that if he caught them wearing hoodies, slides, or headphones in class, or even if they dressed inappropriately while taking online classes, “there’s gonna be a problem.”
Deion sets dress code policy for his players attending class 👀
“No slides. … If I see you with a hoodie or headphones on in class, there’s gonna be a problem.”
(via @DeionSanders, @DeionSandersJr) pic.twitter.com/vQlZHoMXCs
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) August 21, 2025
Some of the same people who have trashed Bukele are praising Sanders for teaching these teenagers and young men to become respectable adults. Why is one much different from the other? Both men are leaders teaching young people how to turn into disciplined adults who make something of their lives. This is not only good for the young people, but for society as a whole.
I’ll admit that my small-government-brain-libertarian-at-heart self kind of bristles at the idea of a government mandating anything, but I feel like I need to remind people yet again that the United States is not the world. The world is not the United States. El Salvador’s history is not ours. What the people of that country have lived through is nothing like what we’ve lived through here in these 50 states.
The same rules don’t and can’t apply. Maybe one day, but not now.
El Salvador is smaller than the state of Massachusetts, and for so long, it was a hellhole — the murder capital of the world, the media called it. It was overrun with gang violence, but Bukele turned it around. He’s now working on maintaining the country’s fragile peace and order. You don’t do that by sprinkling fairy dust or by simply preaching about diversity and inclusivity when a county is that far gone (or whatever liberals think you do these days to solve crime issues — I’ve yet to figure that out). While some may argue with his methods, he turned it into a place that people want to live. He has a 70-90% organic approval rating, depending on who you ask.
More often than not, his critics aren’t domestic; they’re those armchair geopolitical experts who like to stick their noses in where they don’t belong. The people of El Salvador get to choose their leadership, and this is what they wanted.
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