Manners: An Indispensable Ingredient of a Good Education

The word “manners” can elicit various images, and not all of these images are good. To some, the word may evoke a picture of a self-righteous curmudgeon who snarls as he shouts, “Mind your manners.” To others, the word may call to mind a meticulous relative, one notorious for her absence of grace and proper proportion. However, still for others, the word elicits someone sweet and is accompanied by feelings of something lost in our society. But whatever picture you may have in your mind, I want to suggest that manners are indispensable, especially in the education of children, and that the absence of manners in education does harm to those we profess to teach.

Now this essay is not an attempt to discourage you. Like most of us, you have probably sensed the importance of manners in a child’s education but have neglected to encourage them as they ought to be. Take courage. This is a new day, and we must not live in the past but press on, by the grace of God, toward a better future. A grace of life is this: As long as we live, there are opportunities for improvement.

Before we begin, however, we should answer the following question: What are manners? Now to avoid the details of a full investigation, we will use a definition used since the fourteenth century: Manners are “a person’s social behaviour or habits, judged according to the degree of politeness or the degree of conformity to accepted standards of behaviour or propriety.”³Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Manner,” accessed April 6, 2024, https://www.oed.com/dictionary/manner_n?tab=meaning_and_use#37939372. In what follows, the focus will be on manners as a person’s conformity to, or lack thereof, accepted standards of polite social behaviour.⁴It may be noted that “etiquette” and “civility” are often used interchangeably with “manners,” but it is not my purpose here to detail the similarities or distinctions.

As with all things, we should look first to the Scriptures to guide us. Are there any insights into manners from the Bible? In the Old Testament, there are clear examples of standards of what appropriate social conduct is, practices we would call manners. In Leviticus, God gives a direct command for the treatment of the elderly: “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man” (Lev 19:32a), and in Proverbs, we are encouraged to be careful not to overstay our welcome when we visit our neighbour (Prov 25:17). In the New Testament, we are told to be careful with the words we use (Eph 4:29). These, and various other directives, should inform our conduct and help shape our behaviour toward others. But there is something even more fundamental than these specific examples in the Scriptures.

The two greatest commandments, Christ tells us, are to love God with our entire being and to love our neighbour as ourselves (Matt 22:36–40), and the former commandment is the greatest. Now it is disingenuous to claim to love God with our whole heart if we do not regularly spend time with Him in prayer or read His Word and obey His commands (John 15:10); however, what it means to love our neighbour is often debated (for example, Luke 10:29). Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians helps give us a greater appreciation for and clarity about the significance of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and it does so in a way that should shape our regular routines and conduct with one another. In Galatians 5:14, there is an apparent tension with the passage from Matthew 22. Paul writes, “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” But wait, what about loving God? The first and preeminent of the greatest commandments is, on first reading, peculiar in its absence.

There is, however, no tension or contradiction. The paradox, as is often the case, reveals reality in a way that we may not have otherwise seen. Simply put, how we love God is put on display by how we love our neighbour, the person we see in front of us who is made in the image of God. The two greatest commandments are one—though distinctions must be made at times—and they are both found together in the neighbour before us.

Do you want to grow spiritually? Yes, spend time with God, and read His Word; but also, in all of this, do not neglect to love the person in front of you because how you treat this person is evidence of how much you love God.
We can spend time in prayer and God’s Word and yet remain detached from God, as many of the religious leaders did in Jesus’ time, but we need the grace of God Almighty and the love of Christ in our hearts to direct us aright to our neighbour. We can have dreams of loving humanity but in reality despise those around us, as Dostoevsky suggests through one of his characters in The Brothers Karamazov:

“I love humanity,” he said … “In my dreams, … I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity; … and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together, as I know by experience. … In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men.”⁵Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1996), 59.

It takes more than dreams of sacrifice about abstract people; real love is active in its response to the person in front of us. It is in our neighbour that our love for God is proved and fulfilled and our heart is given the opportunity to grow.

But what does all this have to do with manners? Manners are the outward forms of an inward care for others. They are ways—though varied in different times, locations, and cultures—that we can display love for others.

Now it is true that we can have good manners and hard hearts, but it is difficult to see how we can genuinely and regularly show care for others while ignoring manners. It is difficult to understand how we can be attentive in our love for others and not say “Please” when we ask for something and “Thank you” when we receive help or a gift. It is also difficult to see how we can care for others if we never bother even to look at them when they speak to us; to ask them, with interest, how they are; and to speak kindly to them. It is in these ways that we help fulfill the calling that God places upon us and our children to love our neighbours as ourselves.

Children do not learn manners naturally. I promise you this. If you hold a door open for a line of elementary school students, those who have not been regularly encouraged to say “Thank you” will by nature ignore you. Our culture makes these common expressions of gratitude more difficult to learn since it focuses so much of its attention on teaching our children to elevate the self and its desires as the highest good, instead of, as the Scriptures teach us, to esteem others better than ourselves (Phil 2:3) and to care for others in practical ways.

As we are to train children up in the way that they should go (Prov 22:6; Eph 6:4b), and as loving others and looking for ways to bless them is God’s calling on all of our lives, manners are one of the indispensable ways that we can help children orient themselves to the life God calls them and us to.

Now all of this does not mean that we bristle when our five-year-old forgets to say “Thank you.” It does, however, mean that we gently remind him or her that these moments to display gratitude are opportunities to show our care for others and to give to others the thanks that is due. We should also not give in to rude demands from our children, but rather always require them to ask for things politely. When our little balls of energy are polite and respectful to others, we need to occasionally make note of it to them in order to encourage them that they are on the right path.

But is this all not legalism? Will this not lead to a works-based salvation? It is possible that manners, like many other good things, can, without a proper understanding of the gospel, lead a child astray. However, if our children do not have a clear understanding of what God expects of us, namely that we are to love others in concrete ways, it is unlikely that our children will understand how deep human sin resides in their own hearts—that we are curved in on ourselves (incurvatus in se) and prefer to please ourselves rather than care for our neighbours—and only the gospel can set us free to truly serve others as we ought.

Any child’s education must be handled with care, and there are errors on every side. Can manners ever be a problem? Yes. Whenever we look down upon others because we do something that they do not do, we are no better than Pharisees and have twisted the intent of manners into something perverse and vain. (May God help us and forgive us for when we have failed.)

But there is another concern that I should mention here: We must encourage basic manners, such as saying “Please” and “Thank you,” not being rude when speaking to someone, and not interrupting when someone is speaking; however, all manners are not created equal. There are other manners, things that are viewed as polite forms of behaviour in our current culture, that we must resist as Christians.

It is now considered good manners in our culture to support people in sin or, at the very least, to not say anything that may unsettle a person’s expression of himself or herself, however destructive these expressions may be. Though we want to be polite and always filled with grace when we speak, Christian manners must not require silence when there are serious temporal and eternal consequences at stake in a person’s life due to his or her behaviour.

Something else worth mentioning is that though many of what used to be considered basic manners are fading in our culture, even a recovery of these forms of healthy conduct is insufficient. Christian manners go further. Christian manners mean going the extra mile (Matt 5:41), to do good to those who persecute us and to love our enemies (Matt 5:44). We should be more thankful, hospitable, charitable, generous, and more kind than anyone else. While basic manners are important, and children need to be taught them, what God calls His people to is so much higher.

Manners, at their best, are the cultural forms that we use to show to others our love and care for them. Though there are times when manners may be distorted and some of their cultural expressions found wanting, this does not mean that all manners should be abandoned. In the end, as our children learn what it means to be polite and treat others as they should be treated, something that the Scriptures command us to do, we may also find that they will be more welcomed by others and have more opportunities to share the gospel.