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by Keith Redfern

Created on: September 22, 2010

Old fashioned values, by definition, are not the values of today.  They tend to change over time, and older generations are likely to consider that those who are younger have lost the values that were previously prevalent.

It would be reassuring to be able to write that old fashioned values still exist, but are not so commonly experienced in everyday life.  However the truth of the matter is that society’s values now are not the same as they were.  

Fifty years or so ago, for the most part, children were brought up by parents who instilled in them the values of their own youth - honesty, unselfishness, respect for others, respect for the law and those who uphold it.  In three generations Britain has reached a point where honesty, although still appreciated by many as important, can less frequently be taken for granted.     The grasping years of the 80s has produced a culture of selfishness which has become all too common.   With selfishness comes a reduced respect for others as they are considered a hindrance or a barrier to the overwhelmingly preferred desires of self.   This consideration has now reached a point where the forces of law are not seen as friendly supports, but as irritating and invasive impediments to the pursuance of essentially selfish lives.

An attempt to find reasons for these societal changes is not easy.  Some would say that previous generations were brought up to attend Sunday School, and therefore came to understand from an early age the basic Christian (or other religious) doctrine of unselfishness and love.  This is far too simplistic.  A shift from a religious to a secular society will not of itself bring about the changes outlined above.

What was and is far more important to the upbringing of children and young people is the example of parents, and the time, care and patience which they take in inculcating a sense of right and wrong and positive societal values.     This is less effective in the modern western world largely because of the economic need for both parents to work.

For those working in education from the 1960s through to the 1990s, the most dramatic change was the behavior of pupils, and how the teaching of basic moral values, once accepted as a responsibility of parents, now tends to be left to teachers, as the parents have neither the time nor the inclination to do it themselves.   As children spend far more time at home than they do at school, the effective positive influence of their parents is therefore reduced, while the pressure on teachers to take on added responsibility is immense and unfair.

The decade of encouraged selfishness, which was the Thatcher/Reagan years, made things a lot worse.  Young parents began to put self before everything and everyone else, and this attitude has now begun to trickle down to the second generation.

There are many ways in which modern attitudes are different and manifest themselves clearly, and they include attitudes to alcohol intake, levels of stress which cause road rage and a lack of patience generally, and examples of taking advantage of opportunities to be dishonest, like a misuse of time, facilities and computer equipment at work.  So, although there are places and homes where old fashioned values still prevail in Britain, these values are much less commonly apparent in society as a whole.  The change has come about first as economic pressures have made it necessary for both parents to work, thus reducing the effectiveness of parenting, and more recently as an increase in selfish attitudes has led to dishonest actions becoming acceptable and a general decrease in respect for the law.

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