30 Gentleman Rules American Schools BANNED After 1970 That Made Working-Class Fathers Unforgettable

Subscribe to the channel:    / @forgottencharmamerica   In the fall of 1968, a seventh-grade teacher in Youngstown, Ohio was told by her principal to stop teaching boys how to stand when a woman entered the room. The lesson had been part of the standard civics curriculum in that district since 1924. By 1971, it was gone. By 1975, the textbook itself had been pulled. The boys in that classroom were the sons of steelworkers and machinists. Their fathers had been taught the rule by their own fathers, in kitchens, on porches, in garages. The fathers kept teaching it after the school stopped. For one more generation. Then the fathers got tired. Then the fathers died. Then the rule was gone entirely. They did not call them manners. They called them the things a man does. Quiet rules, drilled into boys before they were tall enough to reach the kitchen counter, enforced without explanation by men who had learned them the same way. Between 1968 and 1978, American schools systematically removed every one of these lessons from their curricula. The reasons were many. The result was one. We raised a generation of boys with no instruction manual and then wondered why the rooms they walked into went quiet for all the wrong reasons. Number twenty-seven on this list was banned from a Pittsburgh school district in 1972, and the working-class fathers who kept teaching it at home produced sons who closed sales for forty years that the college boys could not touch. Number fourteen was called sexist by a 1974 education committee and erased from public schools in three states, and modern etiquette consultants now charge eight hundred dollars a day to teach a watered-down version of it. And number two — the rule working-class fathers in steel towns enforced more strictly than any other — was the single behavior that separated a boy who would be hired from a boy who would not.