Why have standards fallen so far?

[dave50]

After watching a documentary last night on TV about the coronation in 1953 it struck me how well dressed the general public were, even going about their daily lives like shopping of having a day out in the park. The women wore dresses and the men wore jackets and ties. Also all the announcers on public films or TV spoke proper English with the clipped tones that are so pleasant to the ear. Nowadays everyone looks scruffy and the media is obsessed with regional accents, whether everyone can understand them or not.

[Old_Geezer]

I don't see wearing a mixture of denim and knee length boots as being a slipped standard, merely a change of fashion. In any case no one has complained about me on "Casual Friday" and sent me home.

[ladybirder]

Well I didn't go out with my belly hanging out or my trousers half way down my bottom.

[mata hati]

I so agree Dave - I'm not sure if its because I am much older now, but everything seems so sleasy. Drinking, nudity, sex, swearing, violence - constantly pushes down our throats by TV and the media. And what happened to respect ? Can it get much worse?

[whiskeryron]

I can remember when exciting films were shown without F words every few minutes & not a sign of bedclothes going up & down, so yes much deterioration.

[boxtops]

I remember wearing formal clothes as a child, but often they were kept for best and Sundays - we didn't have cheap clothes and easycare fabrics.

I for one am glad that received pronunciation has faded out - it was very artificial to most of us.

[joko]

it was just the fashion, it had nothing to do with 'standards' - it just what everyone wore. the people wearing the stuffy formal attire in the park in the sun, werent doing it for some belief that they had to keep up standards or because it made them special, its because for many it was all they had after the war and it was the general dress of the time...these people grew up in the 20s 30s...they didnt have jeans, jogging pants, trainers, t-shirts etc...its only now we view that style as formal wear...but they didnt.
through history people have always followed the fashion.

[New Judge]

Sorry, NOX, but one part of your analogy at least is totally incorrect:

If you spoke 'correctly' and got to go to grammar school you were assured of a good job whereas the bright working class kid could flounder in the mire for being unlucky enough to be born in a lower class family.

My father (and his father) worked as painters and decorators. My mother worked in a factory as a machinist. Both of them had to work to afford the rent on the small flat we lived in along with my sister. (There was no possibility of them buying property). My father never owned a car. We rarely went on holiday. I don’t know whether I spoke “correctly” but I grew up on a council estate where many of my friends walked around with holes in their shoes. So I suppose, if I had to classify my birth and upbringing I would have to say I was born to a “lower class” family. (Well we certainly were not upper class and I don’t think we knew what “middle class” was).

However, there your analogy ends. I got to grammar school (due to my parents’ encouragement and assistance with my education and my efforts at primary school). So I suppose you could say I fit the bill as a "bright working class kid". But I did not flounder in the mire. I received a superb education and as a result managed to gain a few ‘O’ Levels and a couple of decent ‘A’ Levels and went into the sort of employment my mother and father could only dream of. Nonetheless, many of my friends who were not so academically gifted and went to “Secondary Modern” schools also received a very good education and a number of them made even more of their lives than I did.

None of us floundered in the mire but equally none of us was privileged in the way you seem to suggest a child has to be to succeed now. All this came about because education then was far superior to education now and social mobility was far more prevalent than it is now. So I personally am F3cking glad that those standards at least were as they were then. Youngsters (and so all of us) today would be a whole lot better off if, in those respects at least, they were to revert back to those dark and distant days.

[jabuchanjx]

I could be wrong, yet seems before the 60’s everyone was stereo types. All men had the same hair cuts, men and women all wore the same types of clothes, same everything. If you wore blue jeans, tee shirt, hair slicked back with duck flip top, cigs rolled in sleeve you were looked down on, (at least in US) When the personal revolution that included the marches against the war, they changed the way everyone from then on would be. They opened and forced the older generations to except everyone as individuals’ verses forcing them to be in a stereo type group. It is still the responsibility of parents to instill personal hygiene. And in doing so, hoping their kids will care about how they look. However, when so many kids like wearing clothes two to three sizes to big, piercing in places I never even knew you could pierce, tattoos all over, don’t know. I feel the individuality has gone a little too far. Yet that is part of freedom. Right?

[jabuchanjx]

And I have to agree with what NEW wrote. I too wish we could go back to some of the ways we were before. Education today has fallen, and the kids’ education is another story. Teachers do not receive the support and pay as they should, with that said you do not have the people with the desire to become a teacher. In that the classrooms are over crowded, teachers are exhausted, and even some teach in fear.

[baza]

In the early sixties I worked in a well known tailors, in an essex new town, and we got a new manager from hertfordshire who could not understand women coming in to pay the old mans credit account with their hair in curlers, not something he had seen before.
As for regional accents great in their own region but do the people in the south understand a geordie or scottish brogue, I dont .

[heathfield]

In the far-off days, when I was at school, discipline was strict. We were told how to behave, told what was good and what was bad, and were punished if we got out of line. The intention was that we'd grow up and become readily integrated into society. We'd know our place, as they say. Then the do-gooders came along and said that the system was wrong, and that children should be given the opportunity to do their own thing. Children don't like adults telling them what to do, so they went their own way. Of course, there couldn't be any punishment for kids simply wanting to do their own thing. For good or bad, this process has resulted in the society we have today.