Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Bring Back Charm School
It’s time for a weekend break from politics. So today in “A Weekend Break from Politics,” I propose to lobby for the return of Charm School.
I’m not sure when the idea of charm school, or finishing school, went out of fashion. I’m not sure why, either: Perhaps had something to do with the idea that teaching women to be charming was sexist, or that “charm” was an oppressive, patriarchal social construct; or perhaps, as sometimes things do, it just went out of fashion.
But the consequence, I think, is that we’ve come to view charm as something like beauty: Either you’re born with it or you’re not, and if not, too bad for you.
And that’s absolutely untrue. Charm can be learned, and should be learned, because those in possession of it have easier lives. Charmed lives, in fact.
By “charm,” I mean something a bit more than good manners (although the systematic teaching of good manners, too, has sadly fallen out of favor). I mean precisely the things that once were taught in so-called charm schools: posture, voice, elocution, and physical grace.
I think “elocution lessons” disappeared when “charm school” did, and perhaps for similar reasons. This, too, is a shame, because of course elocution can be taught, and usually, it must be taught: It’s rare for it to come naturally. Most people need to be shown, explicitly, how to speak clearly and charmingly, how to control their inflection, pace, pitch, voice resonance, and facial expressions.
And of course people with good elocution have an advantage over those who don’t. If, as I suspect, elocution lessons fell into disfavor because they suggested the existence of a class structure in American society — a truth about our society that we didn’t like — we certainly didn’t rectify this problem by getting rid of elocution lessons. We just ensured that people who weren’t born at the top of the hierarchy would be deprived of the tools they needed to navigate it.
By charm, I stress, I don’t mean beauty, fashion, or grooming. These are separate things. (How many times have you seen an interview with a spectacularly beautiful fashion model who, the moment she opens her mouth, makes you reach for the mute button?)
Charm is charm, but it isn’t magic. It’s not, as some believe — because they haven’t been taught otherwise — mysterious or ineffable.
Or yes, perhaps some aspects of it are, but others aren’t. The elements of charm can be broken down, studied, learned, and made habit.
And they should be. I daily see men and women making life so much harder for themselves through lack of charm. I see sullen body language that invites the rest of the world to respond in sullen kind. I hear voices that I shouldn’t hear, period: If you’re speaking so loudly in a restaurant that people who aren’t at your table can understand what you’re saying, you’re speaking too loudly. I hear voices that set my teeth on edge: In men, high-pitched or nasal voices — or monotone, sullen, and grunting voices; in women, voices marred by upspeak and vocal fry. I hear verbal tics that are guaranteed to annoy — “likes,” “and, uhs.” These people are making life harder for themselves: They’re creating a zone of irritation around them.
But the good news is that all of this can be fixed — and fixed easily! Most of it can even be fixed in a single lesson, after which it’s just a matter of conscious practice for a week or two. Then it becomes a habit.
I reckon it’s now even more important to teach these things to our youngfolk. So many of their social interactions are now conducted online that they really have no chance of acquiring these skills by osmosis.
I thus propose to bring back Charm School.
“Charm school” was, I think, reserved for women, but the same principles apply to men. A high-pitched voice, a hesitant voice, a squeaky voice — all of these things are handicaps. Men and women need to be taught how to make their voices warm, gentle, and animated. Posture, too, should be taught, as should walking gracefully. (Life is so much easier for people with good posture. This is unfair, of course. Good posture is not the same thing as good character. But it’s true.)
So that’s my weekend proposal.
What lessons would you include in charm school?
And how would you go about bringing it back?
Published in General
Oh they do. Lot’s of “yes sir’ and “yes mam”.
Should that be “yes they”?
I love this post.
I once shepherded a bus full of middle school kids to a Christmas concert by the Boston Pops. One of the moms called me and said, “My son wants to know if he has to wear a tie.” I laughed. “Well, it’s Christmas time, it’s Boston, it’s Symphony Hall, so, . . . yes.”
I think the essence of charm is simply caring about other people. As is true of all of us, I’ve known some extremely charming people who weren’t sure which fork to use. And I’ve known some people with impeccable manners who were downright rude and nasty and hurtful to other people.
If your heart is in the right place, the rest seems to follow on its own.
Even though my mom grew up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, she was insistent that my sister and I have proper manners. Unlike so many parents who never take their children anywhere nice, she dragged us to every high-end restaurant and concert in every place we visited (foreign and domestic). She expected us to handle ourselves with grace. I’m so grateful to her for that gift.
I first had the decline of manners and social graces brought to my attention when I was in Boy Scouts, so about the time Nixon was elected. I was a den chief for a Cub Scout den. Our Den Mother got to fussing about the rowdiness of our boys. She and one of the other moms roped me into helping serve a proper afternoon tea to the boys, and coaching them through the steps of arriving as a guest, greeting each other, shaking hands, making introductions, setting the places, etc. &tc. It was all stuff that I had been drilled on at home, but several of these boys were not getting such instructions.
It turned out to be a good lesson, and one that the boys got to discussing among themselves many weeks afterwards. I am sure it was helpful for their entire lives. It only took one afternoon, with some residual coaching in subsequent meetings. We could have done more I suppose, but then again, we were more into camping and outdoors crafts and skills. Good stuff for boys.
It’s probably this Fifth Estate episode.
Aren’t these all merely social constructs?
The opposite end of the spectrum from social construct is natural law. (Either it’s baked into our cake or it’s all made up.) So we have a society that dismisses natural law and also feels entitled to dismiss social constructs as oppressive. What’s left? A bold declaration that every individual can do whatever he wants, and a juvenile expectation that we should respect a man who respects nothing beside himself.
Vocal fry is a tough one for me, since the women who taught me to speak properly (mom and grandma) were martinets about it, but both profound contraltos, and I’m… not. As soon as I’m speaking a language other than English, the urge to go to the basement of my register, always on the edge of frying out, goes away, but speaking English in a higher, healthier register just sounds babyish and insufficiently “serious” to me – at its worst, I just feel like I’m badly imitating a drag queen’s falsetto badly imitating a woman.
In addition to ums, likes, and ahs, awkward silences can really disturb people. Having taken the lesson “think before you speak” a bit too much to heart, my youthful hesitance to speak, and seeming unwillingness to answer questions (which wasn’t unwillingness, just a time lag so I wouldn’t answer thoughtlessly) also came across as incredibly rude. So, I avoided the typical youthful follies of larding my speech up with filler noises, only to fall into an even more antisocial folly, to the point where even medical professionals would briefly wonder whether I was autistic. Evidently, learning to make proper small talk (which I suppose we should define as non-annoying filler phrases during speech) is its own art. Not having learned that art, I’ve found making those annoying filler noises is at least less unsettling to people than periods of stony silence.
Some have wondered why I never volunteer to appear on podcasts. Well, that’s the reason. I sing OK. I write OK. I don’t speak naturally-paced, conversational English OK.
They used to have a charm school in my hometown…or at least that’s what Steve Goodman called it:
(On a side note, I know someone involved with the law enforcement agency responsible for regulating companies like Lincoln Towing, and he says they still have trouble with that company all these years later.)
Yes! And again: The easiest thing to teach. A two-minute lesson. Nothing magical about it. But if no one teaches you how to do it, you won’t know. And if you don’t know, you run a real risk of grossing out the people whose hands you shake. And often they won’t even know why they’re slightly grossed out: It’s a half-conscious thing; you just feel a sense of “ick” if someone shakes your hand wrong — either in the “limp” direction or in the “crushing” direction.
And if your problem is sweat, they make drugs you can coat your hands with overnight to stop that.
Speaking of fillers, one thing that really disturbs me is people who can’t shut up and can’t get to the point. This is not just the ums, likes, and ahs. These jerks refuse to let there be silence. They blather on for a minute to say something that could be said in ten seconds.
I thought about posting that. :)
Well, that’s not good. “Autistic” is not what we’re aiming for at charm school.
Let’s you and I do a podcast where we practice small talk Now,. I reckon you’re probably a lot better at it than you let on, but for the sake of the podcast, you can pretend to be totally clueless about small talk, and we can work through a few lessons together.
Now, a little secret, just between us: I don’t have “small talk” down pat, either. Posture, yes: I am a Nubian Queen of posture. It’s all that yoga, I reckon. But small talk? Still a work in progress. On some days — who knows why, a good night’s sleep, a cup of coffee? (but not two, then I become babbler) I’m a small talk machine. Other days, I’m a sullen lump. So I could use some small talk practice, too.
Let’s definitely start the “charm school podcast,” Midge. You’ll be glad to have it one day when it’s time to teach the kiddos. “See, Mom has to learn this, too.”
Hear, hear.* This is a lesson we really need to teach in Charm School: “How to tell if you’re being boring,” or “This little trick will let you know if you’re secretly boring your friends to tears.”
*Edited to correct my spelling.
It was pretty hilarious, now that I think about it. The kids around me all noticed how polite I was, even if they found it standoffish and awkward. The adults wondered how I could still be so rude.
Snake charming?
A lot does, yes, but a lot simply has to be taught. Like how to get in and out of a car gracefully. No amount of good will in the world will get you out of that car in a ladylike, graceful way unless someone has taken the time to show you.
Well, that was silly, wasn’t it.
Surreptitiously finding something absorbent to grab before a handshake can work, but yes, the drugs are typically antiperspirants in increasing concentrations, though for more refractory problems, even Botox might be used.
Of course. It helps so much if a parent teaches these things; you’d better believe growing up in my home we were taught to speak clearly. But it’s not necessary. You can learn as an adult, no matter how you were raised. To go back to the same example, I didn’t really get it about posture until I was in my 30s and started doing yoga. I realized that people who did yoga a lot had excellent posture, which seemed to relax and put at ease the people around them. So I started to consciously imitate it.
I can’t find a clip but a scene in The Great Debaters comes to mind. . .
Found it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJedoT3ufCI&index=146&list=PL7nDZwRpbsBVFddNCyaOANBCjoA4zjA2Y
Do you know another tune?
I agree. :)
The Discreet Charm of the ICU.
You are beyond all embarrasment.
Regards,
Jim
Towards a Whig History of the Charm School:
a) In the US, regional differences in customs and manners are fewer than they were mid-20th century. My dad (born 1914 in North Dakota) told the story of being invited to dinner in a small town in southern Alabama, showing up at 6 p.m., and finding out he was six hours late. The mid-day meal there was called dinner. Not helping at all that the invite was for “dinner this evening,” and “evening” meant any time after noon in the local parlance. (It just occurred to me that it must have been the custom to supper at six in all the places Pop had been hitherto. Odd.) Thanks to be better communications, the need lessens for a made-up standard for insecure people to cling so to avoid being spit at, shot at, or most important, laughed at in regions they weren’t native to.
b) Etiquette becomes more intricate and worthy of study as people go from poor to rich. You either want to fit in or spot those who don’t status-wise. Let’s call the 1880s Peak Etiquette. Recent loose talk of income inequality aside, one thing a whole lot of us have done in the last couple of centuries is get rich. It’s less important now to know who’s who when so many are who enough. See also Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt S3:E9. We’re all Kaustuppers now. Or at least it’s a reasonable choice.
The death of “beauty” in art accompanied the decline of “charm”. May they both return.
Poor Steve, he died so young. I used to go see him at the Earl when I lived in Chicago. Thanks for reminding me.
In America today, we have what are effectively ANTI-Charm schools. For example, there are books with titles like “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office.” As this example suggests, such messages are being particularly pitched to women, but not exclusively so.