Please address the need to educate children in basic behavior, such as personal space, personal possessions and speaking on the phone. It seems basic manners has been lost, and children are unaware of their responsibility to be polite. Thank you from a concerned parent, grandparent and great grandparent.

You are referring to other people's children, Miss Manners trusts. As a great-grandparent, grandparent and parent, you have put years into rearing generations to have not only basic manners, but underlying respect for the needs and dignity of others.

Yes?

She feels it necessary to verify this because of the demands that so often accompany parents' outcries against mannerless children:

Why doesn't the school system teach proper behavior?

Why don't movie stars, athletes and rock stars set examples of politeness?

Why does television show people being rude?

And, most frightening of all: Why doesn't Miss Manners hold or recommend etiquette classes for children?

Because all these people have other jobs to do -- yes, even Miss Manners, whose sacred mission it is to spread the noble practice of etiquette -- and are not going to go around rearing other people's children.

Besides, it wouldn't work. Childrearing requires daily devotion over a period of years; it cannot be outsourced and compacted into a course. Truly effective role models, whether of good behavior or bad, are not the children's celebrity-heroes of the moment, but the people with whom they live. Miss Manners admires and appreciates the many teachers, public figures, entertainers and others trying to provide such guidance for children who have been deprived of this by their parents. She has dedicated herself to spreading the need, understanding and practice of etiquette, but would appreciate more help from those directly responsible. So would their children, according to those who eventually try to catch up and complain to Miss Manners that their parents short-changed them.