I WAS totally unsurprised by the findings of a study - by Central Lancashire University psychologist Dr Sandi Mann - that while today's young people may have plenty of A-levels, most fail miserably when it comes to social graces.

She found that, according to prospective employers, they did not even know how to shake hands or talk to strangers on the telephone.

At job interviews they slouched in the chair and answered questions with a monosyllabic 'yes 'or 'no' while those who had actually landed jobs arrived late, dressed badly and sulked if they were asked to make tea or run errands.

Modern 'yoof' in a nutshell, is it not? But why has such oafishness crept in? For my own part, I have only to look around a restaurant today and see adults, never mind their teenage offspring, shovelling food into their mouths with cutlery held like it was a pair of shovels to know that the maintenance of manners in school and at home is abysmal.

I clearly remember, even as a three-year-old in nursery school, how, at meal times, our teachers would pounce on anyone not holding their knife or fork properly and how one was expected to first address everyone with a polite "Good morning" or "Good afternoon."

Could it be that with the abandonment of such instruction and with the bearded, suede-booted liberalism that our free-thinking educationalists have encouraged, we have sowed the very yobbism that makes the teachers' job such a misery nowadays and the interviewing of school-leavers such an exasperating experience for employers?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.