Yesterday when I was going home by bus, there was one lady and I saw that she was staking out something from her handbag and dropping them in to the floor. And then only I figured out that she was just cleaning her hand bag. She was taking out all the rubbish like old bus tickets from her bag and removes them by just putting on the floor. The first thing that came into my mind was that doesn’t this person has any sense that what she was doing was wrong? Would she do the same thing inside her own vehicle or inside her home? But I thought that this is one more example of our lack of self-discipline in public places.
I’m very sure that all of us have experienced similar incidents where people do not have any sort of a discipline specially in public places. In our society we do not have the patience to wait in a queue. We do not have any habits to use our mobile phones in a manner that do not disturb others. We do not know how to keep a pet without causing any trouble to our neighbors. And I can add hundreds of actions to this list. But even though we criticize this kind of behavior, it is only a result of a certain cause and to change that result, we have to treat the cause.
What is that cause? It is non-other than the attitudes of the people. Now that lady whom I saw in the bus, would she have done the same thing in side her own vehicle? No simply because it is her own vehicle. It is how she looks at the world. In our society people do not care about others and their rights. It because of the set of the attitudes they have.
So how do we get this kind of attitudes? Do we just inherit them from our birth or are they formed and forged in our minds by some external force. Because the only way to correct this wrong set of ideas is to find out the path that we inherit them.
The attitudes regarding self-discipline are part of the person’s character or personality. It is true that we inherit some part of our character from our birth, but it is the way that a person has been brought up and the environment that the person has been brought up that play the major role in shaping our character.
Now let’s go back to that lady once again. Can we expect that her child will not do the same action? Obviously no because, children tend to imitate their parents and they believe that what their parents were doing right. So the parents and the elders have a major role in developing a society’s discipline.
But the problem is that the parents and the elders are not self disciplined. In that what can we do as it is really difficult to change the mindset of a person after he has established it. From one hand we have to use rules and punishment systems, it will work for some extent and without that anything will not work out. But it is not sustainable.
That is where the education system comes into play. The education system is not merely the school educations system but also the education that we obtain from the religion, media, conferences and universities.
A society is not considered as developed only by considering its wealth. The attitudes and the discipline is a very important factor as it is the key factors which decide the impact of that society on this planet earth. So as a country we have to take necessary measures to change the attitudes of the citizens in a better way and that cannot be accomplished merely by school education. The universities, religious places, the media and all the reputed people have that responsibility and they have to become example
Delivered as a P2 speech at the University of Moratuwa Toastmasters club on 20/09/2011
