When I went to high school, a reminder constantly echoed throughout the hallways: “Tuck your shirts in!” It became the mantra of my teachers, constantly nagging us to tuck our cheap white Oxford shirts into our standard issue dress trousers. I fear I’ve lost most readers already — uniforms (usually shirt/tie/blazer) are an almost ubiquitous part of the British school system — but this piece isn’t really about clothing at all, it’s about the maintenance of standards throughout an institution. 

Whether a shirt is tucked in or not tucked in is important not for the mere result it produces (slightly less scruffy highschoolers), but rather for the principle. It signals that the small, trite aspects of institutional life are some of the most important to maintain, precisely because they are so easy to overlook. Oscar Wilde once wrote that we should treat the trivial things of life seriously: that which we encounter most often should command our most........

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