I reckon that some of these views are just unreasonable grumbling by people who’ve forgotten what it is to be young, demanding a return to the days when children were cowed by fear of adults and respected grown-up’s ability to enforce their authority by force. Perhaps a golden age of civility never really existed. Here’s the case for the defence, put by Oda, a rather good* blogger I who recently stumbled across:
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders…. They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”
“The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have
no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all
restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes
for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are
forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress.”
Quote: Well, both are commonly attributed to Socrates.
Some things never change.
Maybe, then, we just need a bit of perspective before deciding that we’re sliding into a new age of barbarism. There is, however, some anecdotal evidence that things may have changed for the worse over the last few years. A lot of what I hear and read from teachers suggests that trying to maintain order and teach has become an uphill struggle in recent years. Teachers from abroad, in particular, tend to complain that British kids are more surly, uninterested and disrespectful than children back home.
Of course, there may be other factors at work here – lack of support for teachers when they try to take a firm stand, trying to work in a state of permanent revolution, where new teaching initiatives come and go and targets are constantly shifting, the focus on league tables and the pressure to teach to the test rather than just teach. Maybe the kids are no worse than they were, but they now sense that teachers are weakened, under stress, undermined by their superiors and no longer valued as anything more than production line workers tasked with turning out economically useful human widgets at the lowest possible cost.
In such a competitive, test-obsessed atmosphere, maybe kids are getting the message that “the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on … trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each others’ heels” (that was how John Start Mill described an ideology fashionable his time which is still, alas, alive and kicking today). Not a great environment in which to nurture respect, consideration and empathy.
There are some kinds of respect we could do without. I don’t think we need any more respect for authority, which as often as not is the same as respect for power or for the prejudices of those with power. It’s one-way respect without dialogue - “'shut up', he explained”, as someone once wrote.
A more useful sort of respect simply consists of a bit of basic empathy and recognising that other people have rights and feelings. It’s the opposite to the celebration of “trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each others’ heels” as humanity’s natural state. As always, The Golden Rule (“do to others what you would like to be done to you”, or at least “do not do to others what you would not like to be done to you”) is a good rule of thumb.
Here’s another post from Oda with a thought-provoking anecdote about respect:
So I went on a bus. And accidentally went ahead of an elderly gentleman.
I said accidentally, because that was what it was. The bus-stop was full of people, I had forgotten my glasses, and I was late for something. This man then started to yell at me. This is fair enough, I did after-all cut in before him. I said something apologetic, told him I hadn’t seen him, and let him move in ahead of me. But he continued to yell.
Apparently i am personally responsible for all that is wrong with the youth of today with their bad manners, teen pregnancy, drinking, skiving, and lack of respect for the elderly.
Wait a sec… Respect for the elderly? This man was in no way old enough to have fended off the nazis singlehandedly, had a far as I was aware not himself produced any of my textbooks, was from his vocabulary not much to look up to in the form of intellectual capacity, had just said that I was going to get drunk and then pregnant ENTIRELY based on my age and an accidental queue-jump, and he demanded respect. Not as a human being, but as a member of a group(Of which there are some members have the greatest respect, but that is by the by), and that his belonging to this group gave him the right to publicly insult members of another group. Due to a hierarchy of status and inherent worth between them.
No matter which groups are considered more or less worth others, and no matter how old the person having these opinions are, I have very little respect for that sort of thinking.
Of course, I could have confronted him with these opinions and drawn lined between his group-hierarchy way of thinking to far less pleasant systems of discrimination, and thus challenged his world-view, perhaps brought a new perspective to him, or have his opinions explained clearer, put in a context…
Some would say that this would be cruel to an old man who is set in his ways and who will never change his ways of thinking. Or in other words that his opinions are of little importance since he is going to die soon anyway, so we might as well humour him. That would be respectful to the elderly.
So I showed him that respect.
Good point, well made, I thought.
*Well, very good in English. After a bit of time with Google Translate, I might also be able to offer a valid opinion on the bits written in Norwegian.
0 comments:
Post a Comment