Manner Talks

Note: The data were gathered during the first semester, academic year 2009-2010.

Manners and baking everyone’s favorite dessert – cake are alike in some ways. We know how the taste of cakes varies with respect to the proportion of the amount of ingredients we put together. Too much sugar would make the mixture too sweet while too much egg would make it too fluffy. Molders also affect the mixture not perhaps in the taste of the cake but rather on how the cake would appear. Molders give shape of the cake which set its appearance desirable or otherwise. Now, just like cakes, manners are also molded. These are shaped in order to appear as amiable as it could possibly be. In contrast, manners are not molded by those steel frames we use in cakes. Molding what generally talk about who we really are is not easy.

Manners are molded by different factors. In fact, these factors affect the way we see one another because these factors mold the manners which speak to our own characters. For manners are not immune to changes as we continue to move forward and undergo the process of evolution, my classmate last semester, Ms. Christy May Montecalvo, and I approached some people inside the Mindanao State University- Iligan Institute of Technology (MSU-IIT) campus and asked them of the condition of manners in today’s IITians, whether they see these good or bad. Furthermore, we tried to bring these comments to our own understandings, evaluated it and related it to which factors these most likely be an effect of.

The first factor that manners are molded by is the parental concerns that are supposed to be observed especially in home. An article writer of Helium.com, in the person of Gabriella Samms, has pointed out that the main cause of nicety that we observe among the youth nowadays is the lack of parental concern imposed to them. She has written there that manners fly out the window when parents stop teaching manners to their children. This should probably the reason of why the janitors, when were asked, had said in abrupt pace that students in IIT do not observe cleanliness at all. Students would have probably not well guided in their houses where they were supposed to be trained of simple thing as cleaning. Parents, when their children were still in home, had not instilled to the minds of their sons or daughters the ways on how to promote and preserve proper hygiene or probably the parents themselves knew nothing about it that is why they failed to expose their children on this basic community obligation.
It is indeed a fact that what we see on the elders is what we also expect to see on younger generations. Parents who never learned the proper tools for going out into society would not pass the proper ones onto their children. This is how we can best explain how history repeats itself.

However, manners are not just affected by how the parents raise their children. There are children who are raised with guiding manners but, somehow along the way, they have been losing the manners that are taught to them. Thus, A. Kyles, an author of the same site, has said in her article that manners are affected not only by parental concern but also by the society where people live. She has further divided the societal factors into two - first are the television shows and secondly, the school where the children are molded significantly.

Television today is not like it was ten or fifteen years ago. Shows on T.V. are somehow more liberated than the shows before. Perhaps, giving much freedom on self-expression nowadays brings this out. Since T.V. is one of the tools through which we learn and entertain ourselves, it significantly affects us and much more of our manners. T.V. can be a source of good things but mind you, this can also be a concrete source of bad ones.

Through our thorough understanding, we came up to associate the comments of the students and the teachers about the IITians’ manners to T.V. as the primary molding factor. Students of the same institution, when were asked, had said that IITians are ill mannered. Moreover, they said that students take their opportunity here in IIT for granted through their acts that simply put what their parents have paid for their schooling into waste such as too much playing of computer games and engaging oneself into vices. In like manner, teachers had seen students as that. In addition, they said that students are becoming rude. They said that students do no longer know how to say polite words anymore.

TV should be the cause of it, shouldn’t it? TV publicizes almost everything; it brings our minds into consciousness and in one way or another, it provokes as to do things. Inaccurate publicity and advertising of technological breakthroughs especially in computers urges oneself to try one and abuse it badly. Ever wonder why cigarette commercials do no longer exist nowadays? It is because addiction to it is now common in the society, even the youth use it. For this reason, some people prefer to bring television to its good old days and the reason is apparently for the youth’s own sake.

School is another factor in teaching manners. School as an institution plays a very significant role in the society because this is where the minds as well as the characters of the children are molded. For this reason, no one can deny how powerful school is that it can build a country or destroy one through, of course, the education that it imparts to the people.

It is clear that molders on which manners are shaped by differ from situation to situation. That is why, we cannot control what people could say about the manners that we possess because we are not the ones who pick the frame through which we mold our own character. Unlike baking cakes, we do not have the total control of the whole process. All we know, especially as beginners, is to let ourselves be exposed on the factor and wait what effect it could possibly do to us. But once we could already see how life could possibly go through if we possess this trait or that, then perhaps, we could already be the baker of our own manners and we can even bake the best character in the world.