Manners maketh man - so let's teach them

"Manners maketh man" was one of William Horman's proverbs lovingly set out in his Vulgaria all the way back in the 16th century. It is still the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford and we should perhaps pay it a little more attention.

I recall one (middle class) parent, when pulled up on her childrens' poor behaviour at the table, exclaiming, "oh, table manners, they're so middle class". As if this did her children any favours. There's a reason why we think manners are important, why we frown on eating with mouths open, speaking while eating and the correct use of the cutlery provided. And there's a reason why we insist on children saying please and thank you, not interrupting and showing respect to older people.

That reason is that politeness and good manners make for better people - easier to live or work with, more pleasant to deal with and more likely to get on. Good manners, politeness and charm go a long way just on their own and, as that old teacher William Horman knew, they allow for brains, skills and creativity to shine through. Without manners all we see is coarseness, unpleasantness and rudeness. It's not that manners are everything but that they are an essential component of the successful person.

Manners and politeness aren't innate, they have to be taught. Left to their own devices children won't say please and thank you, won't show respect to others and won't become pleasant, charming adults. We seem, in our frantic age, to have forgotten all this and to have arrived at a point where aggression, bullying, vulgarity, cursing and rudeness are celebrated while politeness, charm, respect for others and good manners are become weaknesses.

I was at a posh dinner and, in a conversation with the gentleman besides me, the subject of a TV interview with former spin doctor, Alistair Campbell came up. My neighbour was blown away by Campbell's behaviour - he was being interviewed along with a woman (and remember Campbell is a very big man). "While she was talking," gushed my neighbour, "he folded his arms and leaned in dominating her, it was brilliant". It struck me at the time that, far from being brilliant, Campbell was just being an ill-mannered, rude bully. The argument wasn't won by the brilliance of Alistair's argument but by his intimidation of the other, far smaller, person.

Everywhere you look, people are celebrating this sort of behaviour - the sort of people who use violent metaphor in political debate have always been with us but it has never been normalised in the way it is today. And when the leaders in school begin to act, to once again teach children politeness, good manners and respect, the response from those celebrants on modern coarseness is shocking:

Top of the things that make me despair this week (there are many options) is the decision by Ninestiles secondary school in Birmingham to enforce silence on “all student movement, including to and from assembly, at lesson changeover and towards communal areas at break and lunch”. It is difficult to think of a more harmful and mean-spirited policy than taking away children’s means of communication for a significant part of the day.

To watch the opprobrium poured onto Katherine Birbalsingh for her advocacy of teaching working class young people manners, good behaviour and politeness is to see that "manners are so middle class" made flesh. Today, Ms Birbalsingh's Michaela School is routinely described as 'Britain's strictest school' because it insists on a set of standards in children's behaviour, enforces those standards and expects parents to back the school in this work. Hardly a day passes without some comment about behaviour in schools, how it stresses teachers, disrupts learning and contributes to mental ill-health. Yet when a school does something about this, the same folk pile in using words like "prison", "institutionalising" and "controlling".

I appreciate I've little room to talk but it really is time we called out ill-mannered behaviour and gratuitous rudeness. For sure, you can invoke free speech (and have my backing) but it's perfectly possible to support free speech and, at the same time, believe that good manners and politeness are preferable to vulgar insult or crude metaphor. Right now our political discourse is become corrupted by its language - the two extremes, having adopted an absolute position, do not seek to debate but rather to adopt that Alistair Campbell behaviour of aggressive domination, rudeness, ill-manners and wind up all spiced, if you're on Twitter, with gross language.

It is, for example, right that we call out the use of children by parents as vehicles for their political prejudice. This is a ghastly exploitative practice and grown ups should know better but calling the grown up using his child this way a 'cretin' isn't right or justified however angry we might be about the action. And using the "he said, she said" argument to defend this sort of language doesn't wash either - "we are better than that" is a far better argument.

I wish every success to people like Tom Bennett and Katherine Birbalsingh as well as Alex Hughes and Andrea Stephens, the joint heads at Ninestiles School in Birmingham. Civilisation is built on an assumption of good behaviour, politeness and respect, without these values it's hard to do all the other collaborative, co-operative and creative things that make for a great, successful society. Manners really do maketh man and for this to happen we need to teach those manners because they don't happen without that teaching.

....