The days of chivalry and respect seem to be long gone these days.
Over the past 15 years or so many people who live in Smolensk have
become more rude and disrespectful. I believe there are many
contributing factors that have led to this rudeness. Selfishness and
greed for money have led to many other byproducts such as disrespect
to people and the lack of accountability to anyone. Kids treat their
parents and teachers with disrespect and also treat each other badly.
I am a school teacher and have been for
about 4 years now. For just the time I have taught at school I have
seen a complete turnaround from when I came. The disrespect and
attitude that some of people have is crazy.
We don’t question the
conventional wisdom that childhood is in crisis; we want to say that
poverty and terribly low moral standards that engulfed substantial
majority of families and darkened their lives have become a new issue
for the state system of education. It is not simply about raising the
price of education; many more fundamental problems
arise – schools know much more about the state of Russia Olympic
Team than they do about the state of their children. It shows that
there is a lot of hypocrisy and double standard practices
within the national education system.
Even further, this seems to be the age of tolerance and acceptance because we are all forced to accept someone's wrong-doings. Society is in fear about being accountable and being able to tell someone else that they are doing something wrong. The Moscow Patriarchate headed by ecumenical patriarch Cyrill has allowed this to creep in the very fabric of Russian way of life, where we get the ‘feel good’ gospel and sin is overlooked and become accepted by every civilian institution.
There are many things to blame on this but it all comes back to
selfishness. All good manners can be summed up in one sentence:
Do unto others as you would have them to do unto you. In other words,
treat others as you want to be treated.
