European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - August 27, 1994, Darmstadt, Hesse                                Remaining Calm instead of laying on the Horn is a much More civil a Way of handling the inevitable traffic Jam. A maintaining manners in an uncivil world by James Auer the Milwaukee journal t s 4 55 . The Telephone rings. You Rise unsteadily from your Couch of sem slumber and stagger toward the sound. Quot hello Quot silence. Quot hello is anybody there hello Quot More silence. Followed by a Click. Evidently a wrong number. The caller did t have the Good manners or taste or whatever to apologize for this unwelcome Early morning intrusion. Cautiously you Back your car out of the driveway and into the daily traffic crawl toward work. The Driver of a Rusty old Toyota abruptly veers across two lanes nearly clipping your front bumper and taking a spot ahead of you resulting in a net gain of one car length. When you Register Surprise the Driver of the other car leers into the rear View Mirror and gives you the Finger. Once in the lobby of your building you March toward an open elevator. Nobody pushes the hold Button. The doors close swiftly in front of you narrowly missing your nose. Call it a decline in manners. Call it a collapse of taste. Call it what you will. It still adds up to a tragic erosion of the instinctive civility that once lubricated our relations one with the other and made the everyday crises of life somehow survivable. Some believe it All goes Back to the 60s, when manners and taste were dismissed As Mere charades that allowed one class to dominate  there s More to it than Bourgeois pomp and populist Pride Market economics and institutionalized hierarchies of influence. It s a matter of personal values As Well. Good taste and manners Are after All the twin keys to survival in a universe in which space is finite and resources limited in which we must All of necessity coexist peacefully. At least one authority on etiquette agrees that the decline in manners and the exaltation of rudeness has its roots in the 60s-stye exaltation of Quot feelings Quot Over manners. Quot there has been a tremendous decline in Basic civility Quot claims Judith Martin better known As miss manners. Quot it was one of the terrible ideas of the 60s. Good manners were worse then a y irrelevant they were bad for children. And so the civilizing Force of etiquette was  behind that abandonment the syndicated columnist went on to explain Lay the idea that All problems Are simply a matter of communication. Quot if not for this misunderstanding or so the argument went everyone would love everyone else Quot she said. Quot it was a seductive Sweet idea but not very  a predictable consequence of the. Move away from a format code of behaviour a Rise in violence on the one hand and of litigious Ness on the other. Quot when people talk about senseless crime these Days Quot she said Quot they mean that it s Over a perception of disrespect. And respect is not a Legal  a parallel theory about the Rise of Martin social tension a abrasive Ness on the Highway insensitivity in the office a attributes much of the problem to a weak National Economy. This argument propounded not Long ago by a writer for Usa today holds that with opportunities limited raises rare and promotions rarer friction inevitably develops. Calls go unreturned letters unanswered invitations unacknowledged. Feet on the lower rungs of the ladder Are stomped on. High flying careers Are deftly subtly deflated. Self preservation becomes a Way of life. So do self serving stratagems and an urge to avoid personal responsibility to seize the credit and shift the blame to others. Seat of the pants decisions yield to formulaic conclusions common sense analyses to professionally managed Market surveys deeply rooted instincts to computerized trends. Ironically the Dulcet voiced miss manners it believes there s reason not Only for Hope but for optimism. Why because nobody wants to stay y at a hotel where guests Are treated rudely or have a car fixed at a Dealership where customers Are brusquely dealt with. Good manners and taste Aren t just matters of morality and Breeding she s convinced. They re essential to survival in today s highly competitive Economy. The business that treats people Well has an economic Edge. For that reason if for no other taste and considerate behaviour will be encouraged. Once again it appears the free Market a in ideas products human values and interpersonal behaviour a will have the last word. Scrupps Howard nows service on the family q a we have a 6-year-old son who is a late Bloomer and he is having trouble learning to read. Is there a link Between his immaturity and this perplexing problem a it is Likely that your late Bloomer has not completed a vital neurologic process involving an organic substance called myelin. At birth the nervous system of the body is not insulated. That is Why an infant is unable to reach out and grasp an object the electrical command or impulse is lost on its journey from the brain to the hand. Gradually a whitish substance myelin begins to coat the nerve fibres allowing controlled muscular action to occur. Myelin nation typically proceeds from the head downward and from the Center of the body outward. In other words a child can control the movement of his head and neck before the rest of his body. Control of the shoulder precedes the Elbow which precedes the wrists which precedes the Large Muscles in the hands which precedes Small muscle coordination of the fingers. Mme a this explains Why children Are taught Block letter printing before they learn cursive writing the Broad strokes and lines Are less dependent on minute Finger control than the flowing curves of mature penmanship. Since visual apparatus in humans is usually the last neural mechanism to be myelin Ted your immature child May not have undergone this necessary developmental process by age 6. Therefore such a child who is extremely immature and uncoordinated May be neurologically unprepared for the intellectual tasks of Reading and writing. Reading particularly is a highly Complex neurological process. The visual stimulus must be relayed to the brain without distortion where it should be interpreted and retained in the memory. Not All 6-year-old children Are equipped to perform this task. Unfortunately however our culture permits few exceptions or deviations from the established timetable. A 6-year-old must learn to read or he will face the emotional consequences of failure. If age is such a poor Factor to us Lton determining classroom readiness Why Jajio schools use it exclusively to indicate when a child will enter kindergarten j in because it is so convenient. Parents can plan for the definite beginning of school when their child reaches 6 years of age. School officials can Survey their districts and know How Many first graders they will have the following year. If an 8-year-old moves into the District in october the administrator knows with certainty what Grade that child belongs in and so on. The use of chronological age As a criterion for school Entrance is great for everybody a except the late Bloomer. Or. James c. Dobson 18 president of focu3 on the family an organization dedicated to preserving the Home. Correspondence should be sent to him at focus on Trie family . Box 444, Colorado Springs Colo. 80903. Saturday August 27,1994 the stars and stripes