One day I left Tai Chi practice in casual conversation with a classmate who walked me home 16 blocks without batting an eyelash. It wasn’t due to a romantic interest (he’s happily married), nor because he lived nearby -in fact he’d gone a half hour out of his way.  He simply chose to accompany me the entire walk rather than interrupt our conversation. My classmate wasn’t acting out of some patronizing chivalry, but from a habit of prioritizing graciousness and courtesy in human exchanges whenever possible -an attitude known in Argentina as educación.

I first heard the word during a conversation with my Argentine in-laws, who used it to describe someone’s  manners at a social gathering. In keeping with the North American disdain for social pretensions and old-fashioned airs, the comment sounded slightly outdated, even snobbish at the time. But now I also employ educación as a term to describe the kind of behavior that allows us to interact harmoniously with others. It can include education in the conventional sense of one’s schooling and cultivation but tends to refer to one’s private education within the contours of family and intimate social groups. When someone is said to have buena educación it means they’ve been well raised and know how to treat those around them with grace and generosity. The English equivalent might be etiquette (a word that also exists in Spanish), but while etiquette spells out a matrix of polite conduct, educación implies a deeper set of values, a framework for organizing social relations, an ethos.

Of course, educación is a value the upper classes would like to claim as their own, but as often as not it is the rich who stand to learn from the humbler classes in this regard. When I saw a man wearing work boots and carrying a toolbox politely give up his bus seat to a well-heeled older woman who didn’t even look at him as she took it, much less say thank you, I knew the former had buena educación which the latter lacked.

The disappearance of educación in modern life has undermined our ability to get along with others outside the safety of preexisting family and friendship bonds. Even in Argentina it is something of an endangered ethos, and that is a shame. Most important are not the surface gestures educación preserves (a dinner guest who unfailingly brings a bottle of wine or dessert), but the fact that social interactions become smoother and more pleasant under its influence. I’ve found my exchanges with people are more generous, open, and courteous when shaped by this practiced sensitivity to others. Educación delineates a common ground in which people can interact according to pre-defined forms preserving social equilibrium and ease. For instance, in an apartment building, buena educación would entail greeting other tenants in public areas like the elevator, holding the front door open when someone else is coming in or out and cultivating an atmosphere of goodwill that makes it easier for everyone to co-exist with one another. It would be mala educación, on the other hand, to ignore neighbors when you see them or to leave cigarette butts in the hallways.

In general, educación values public harmony over individual impulses and because of this it has been accused of suffocating personal liberties, self-expression and spontaneity. The modern tendency is to discard the conservative decorum of buena educación in favor of a less self-conscious informality. But we run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we thumb our noses wholesale at old-fashioned conventions. It is healthy to break rules when they become too restrictive, but abandoning rules altogether creates a social vacuum where there are no common values to ease public relations and individual urges are indulged at the expense of communal stability. Sadly enough, this modern “me first” attitude is unraveling intricate social fabrics woven over the course of millennia.

Educación at its best derives value from the assumption of a social contract in which all are invested. The idea is that if we all want to co-exist peacefully, certain codes of conduct should guide our everyday interactions and make them less abrasive for all involved. While this posture shouldn’t necessarily dictate our private relationships, it provides the unspoken code that enables two strangers to know how to treat one another in public situations, from who gets priority on bus seats to being a polite customer to how checks are settled among groups at a restaurant. In the absence of such codes, people usually protect their own interests and ignore those of others by default– not because they’re unkind or ungenerous, but simply because there’s no clear way to negotiate others’ interests. Just as it’s harder to say hello to someone unless you think they’ll say hello back, it’s also harder to treat people courteously without a common definition of courtesy. In this way, educación as a value supports a healthy public life in which trust and consideration for others are as important as our own private urges.

In the pioneer-spirited United States, the mannerisms equated with educación are typically devalued or at least eyed with suspicion as a remnant of the elitist Old World. There are vestiges of the traditional unspoken covenants, generally in areas where communities remain small and close-knit. But in growing urban and suburban corridors transience and diversity create an atmosphere that devalues the public realm and its ethics. In this environment the dominant attitude is the American truism “every man for himself.” But this results in an odd schizophrenia in which people may be generous and warm at home but insensitive and rude in the cold anonymity of the streets.

Now that I’ve had a taste of a society that still values these traditional conventions, I wonder whether being old-fashioned in our treatment of others is really all that bad. There is a satisfaction in letting an older person on the bus first or saying hello to the newspaper vendor I pass each morning instead of averting his gaze. It is satisfying because I am coaxed out of my personal universe by these gestures and reminded of the millions of other universes with whom I share this building, this block, this city and ultimately this world. If we lose our sense of educación, we would lose one of those rafts on which strangers can take refuge from a sea of averted eyes and together practice the old rites of courtesy, the choreography of generosity, the daily gesture of graciousness. The little things that help us remember we are not alone.

Posted by: Catherine Black

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