Etiquette and Who Should Teach It

On adding the teaching of etiquette to the school curriculum – “There can hardly be a more enlarged field for study and practice than this involves ; nor is there any field of education in which there is greater scope for the ingenuity of the urbane teacher. Much depends on the teacher, and far more on the matter of her instruction.”

Politeness by the Book

The school board of this city has resolved to add a course of lessons in etiquette to the regular curriculum of the public schools. Manuals of politeness are to be furnished, aud some of the best readers will read aloud from these, the teacher following in a brief oral exposition with practice in the various branches. The studies in etiquette are to cover a wide range. General precepts are to be particularized into such details as dress, carriage and bearing, conversation, table-manners, riding and driving, school-deportment and the rules of behavior laid down by George Washington. 

There can hardly be a more enlarged field for study and practice than this involves ; nor is there any field of education in which there is greater scope for the ingenuity of the urbane teacher. Much depends on the teacher, and far more on the matter of her instruction. A teacher who undertakes to “hear a recitation” in politeness, after the wooden manner in which a large proportion of the recitations are “heard,” will make the thing intensely ridiculous. An acidulous person whose habit is to enforce lessons by scolding them into the children will make their victims hate politeness aud despise the very name of it. The instructor who drills the classes in the mere observances of polite forms and phrases may succeed in rescuing the scholars from the extremity of boorishness, but will fail in imparting to them any of the graces of geuuiue good breeding. The teacher whose custom it is to bark and bite at the poor children in order to drive instruction into their unwilling minds will find himself a laughing-stock as he reads off from his politeness-book some unpleasant injunction to courteous demeanor. 

There is a great deal of so-called politeness which is only of the book, bookish. It is empty, formal and unsatisfactory, it is well that children speak when they are spoken to, do as they are bidden, salute their betters in an elegant manner, keep their persons clean and do unto others as they would have others do to them. But the mechanical ritual of all these things may be made a continual horror. Some teachers and parents keep children in a constant state of worry by saying, as they tweak the ears of the poor creatures or with the knuckles rap them on the head: “Sit up, there!” or “Behave now, will you?” Many otherwise excellent people introduce this sort of etiquette-drill at the table, until the rigorous way in which the lambs are made to bleat out “please” and “thank you” is enough to destroy the appetite of anybody who practices and values true politeness. 

Success or failure in teaching politeness depends on whether the teacher is or is not polite than on the particular manual of etiquette which a school board may select. There are fine arts and true graces in real politeuess which some boors can never master. There is a refinement and an elegance in it which is inborn with many people. If instruction in the art is attempted with the right spirit and by the proper sort of people, there is hope that it may be measurably successful. But there are some crusty and ill-favored imparters of instruction who should forever be excused from all attempts at teaching the doctrines or practices of etiquette. –Philadelphia Times, May 8, 1880

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia