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A student barks at a teacher for an answer without raising a hand or asking “please”. On the bus home, a teenager sprawls across two seats as an elderly woman stands.
These are just two incidents that make year 12 student Frankie Johnston prickle. The 17-year-old Kambala student has noticed a steady rise in rude behaviour among her generation. Now she is on a mission to make everyone mind their manners.
Frankie has created an initiative, Manners Matter, in the hope of starting conversations about how students interact with adults and one another.
She has pushed for her school to hang posters reminding students to use “please” and “thank you”, and has surveyed schools on the issue of declining manners.
“A lot of the feedback has been surprisingly honest, with many people saying they’ve noticed the same shift,” Frankie said.
“Things like respect, listening and basic manners don’t seem as strong as they used to be. It’s something lots of students recognise, even if we don’t always talk about it openly.”
Her friend Sophia Dan, initially taken aback by Frankie’s initiative, now thinks it is a great idea. “Everyone has noticed there is a decline in manners and respect,” Sophia said.
“Because so much communication shifted online [during COVID], when people returned to face-to-face, social habits and manners declined because there was less in-person interactions.”
Sophia believes that social media has affected the way young people interact. “The language online is a lot harsher, and there’s definitely less emphasis on kindness and respect,” she said.
The nation’s classrooms have ranked among the most disruptive in the world – a third of all students say they do not listen to the teacher in most lessons.
Former teacher and author Michelle Mitchell runs well-being programs in schools.
She describes a generation fluent in eye-rolls, sarcasm and ignoring adults: patterns she links to a perfect storm of relentless technology use, lockdowns and time-poor parents.
“I think it’s not that they can’t,” Mitchell said. “I think they’ve had fewer opportunities to practise, and they’ve had less accountability. Teaching manners takes practice. It takes repetition.”
Mitchell said that lockdowns occurred during the most formative years of adolescence for some, robbing children of a year of critical social learning.
“Teenage years are like dog years,” she said, explaining that if you miss that learning window, it’s much harder to build the skills later.
“The reality is, it’s just slipped through the cracks.”
Mitchell said this perfect storm is playing out in interesting ways. Students are avoidant, dismissive and don’t respect authority.
“They can walk into a class late and not even acknowledge that they’re late,” she said. “They can ignore instructions and pretend that they didn’t hear them.
“Manners, at their core, are about recognising that there’s another person in a room. And that’s what this generation hasn’t done.”
While she agreed that social media had reshaped how young people spoke to one another, Mitchell cautioned against treating phones as the sole villain. “We’re blaming everything on technology,” she said, “when a lot of it has more to do with how the adults around a child choose to handle that technology.”
Mitchell recalled watching four siblings sit through a long dinner with their grandparents – no devices, no complaints. “That’s the way it’s meant to be,” she said. “That’s how you learn manners: just by being present.”
Not all teenagers are checking out. Mitchell sees a growing group of “nonconformists”, children such as Frankie who are “tired of it” and insisting that everyone deserves to feel safe, heard and respected.
Professor Anna Sullivan has researched the effect of low-level disruptive behaviour – such as arriving late to class, speaking over others and ignoring instructions – on a class. Her research has found that misbehaviour challenges teachers more than student violence and aggression.
She said that schools and parents have a responsibility to explicitly teach social skills. “You want them [students] to be learning it everywhere.”
At Trinity Grammar, headmaster Tim Bowden expects all students to greet visitors to the school and offer them assistance.
“If they need to go somewhere, you don’t point them where to go – you take them where to go,” he said. “We have been explicit in saying this is how we do it here, and we also model.
“When an adult comes to the door of a classroom while the class is under way, the boys all stand up. It’s an acknowledgment of respect.”
He said this may be considered “old-fashioned”, but it indicated respect.
“Respect is, at its heart, saying that someone or something matters. Manners are just a visible expression of that.”
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Emily Kowal is an education reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.From our partners
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