At first, I didn't understand what I'd heard. It was undifferentiated noise. A shout? Some kind of hubbub? It was only when I saw the look on Nancy Pelosi's face — her expression shading from startlement to alarm to disbelief, and then to shock, indignation and anger — that I really heard it, understood that the sound had been a voice from the floor of the House of Representatives shouting, "You lie!"

The president, in typical no-drama-Obama mode, took it in stride. "Not true," he said mildly, and continued with his prepared address to the joint session of Congress.

I identified with Pelosi. I read somewhere that she grew up in Baltimore and went to Catholic school all the way through, just as I did a few years later outside of Boston. I could see all those years of Catholic education in the progression of emotions that crossed her face. Old-style Catholic schooling had its weaknesses. I still can't believe we had to sit there for months in sophomore English listening to Mother Mary Eucharia read -- haltingly, since she was also trying to keep an eye on us to make sure nobody was talking -- "Silas Marner" aloud. At least with waterboarding you have every reason to expect that you will drown and the pain will stop.

But we did learn that there are some things you just don't do. We learned, for one thing, that you don't talk back to the principal in public. Ever. We learned it in our bones.

I'm not saying it was the greatest lesson. I'd rather have my children, if I had any, learn that, if you happen to disagree with the principal, the appropriate thing is to voice your opinion respectfully at the appropriate time and make a persuasive logical case for it. It took me a long time to figure that out for myself, and to unlearn my expectation that a person who disagreed out loud with an authority figure would most likely be turned into a pillar of salt on the spot.

Still, there was an advantage to living in a community where everybody knew what the rules were: Everybody knew how to behave.

Now, not so much.

"Here's somebody who went to jail for spitting," my breakfast companion said the other day, looking up from his paper.

"See," I said, "I told you spitting on the street was illegal, besides being unsanitary." Though I see people do it all the time now. Is it that they don't know they're not supposed to, or they just don't care?

"He spat on a cop," the companion said. Which you'd think anybody would know was a bad idea.

But more and more lately I've been noticing how many people seem somehow not to have learned things that everybody used to know. Don't clean your fingernails at the dinner table. Don't wear pink sweatpants to a funeral. Don't hang out in the passing lane if you aren't going fast enough to pass anybody. Don't swear on the street at full volume within earshot of other people's grandmothers. Don't honk your horn at elderly pedestrians who are taking too long to cross the street. Don't interrupt the president's address to a joint session of Congress to call him a liar.

Why don't people know these things? They missed class that day? They didn't get the memo? They were raised by wolves?

Why didn't their parents tell them?

Maybe their parents don't know either, or maybe they weren't around that much.

Maybe these are things that don't come up that much on TV, which picks up so much of the socialization slack.

Kids probably don't learn these things in school because we've decided teachers shouldn't be responsible for teaching manners and morals. We don't trust them, for one thing. People who suspect that the president, if given an opportunity to speak to schoolchildren, will do his best to corrupt them are not likely to trust some random fourth-grade teacher with the moral education of their children.

When I was a kid, you got the same message over and over from parents, grandparents and the sisters at school, which made it almost impossible not to learn. Lower your voice. Don't point. Say please. Say thank you. Wash your hands. Elbows off the table. Enunciate. Stand up straight. Stay off Mrs. Lundgren's grass. Make your bed. Hang up your clothes. Help your mother. Do your homework. Be on time. Ladies first. Look at me when I speak to you. Eat your vegetables. Chew with your mouth closed. Don't speak with your mouth full.

(A Freudian slip has me type Don't speak with your mouth open. And indeed there was a certain sense then that nobody was all that interested in hearing what you had to say. Your job was to listen, learn and, above all, not bother the grown-ups.)

In first grade, we learned to stand up immediately when the principal entered our classroom and curtsey while saying in one voice, "Good morning, Reverend Mother." (The boys bowed from the waist, right forearm held stiffly across the waist in front, left across the waist in back.)

There isn't that much call for curtseying anymore. (Though I'll be ready, should that change.)

Another problem with some of the rules of behavior we learned is how many of them turn out, on close inspection, to be arbitrary. You can imagine cultures where it's rude not to clean your fingernails at the table before dinner. Still, there's something to be said for knowing the rules of the culture you live in.

In "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior," Judith Martin argues that, though manners may change, the moral principles that underlie them do not.

But people raised by wolves don't learn either one, the manners or the underlying principles.

Consider spitting on the street, hogging the passing lane, hosting loud parties on your patio at 3 in the morning within easy water pistol range of at least a dozen neighbors whose windows are open, not bothering to RSVP in case something more interesting should come up, carrying on loud personal conversations in public places as if all the people forced to listen in don't exist, snarfing up the last four pork chops off the serving platter even though two other dinner guests have yet to be served, not picking up after your dog, swearing within earshot of grandmothers, honking at poky elderly pedestrians who happen to be in your way, yelling at the president from the floor of the House.

All have one thing in common. The perpetrator fails to notice either that other people exist or that his actions affect them, or else he doesn't care. He feels no obligation to avoid causing them annoyance, inconvenience, discomfort, expense or whatever. In his view, he's entitled to do whatever he likes. Too bad if irrelevant other people can't sleep or don't get any dinner or get a big clot of phlegm on their nice new shoes or have to pay the caterer for dinners that won't get eaten. Wolves don't worry about things like that.

Life is more pleasant when people do, but how do we persuade them?

Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Press Syndicate, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas City, MO 64106 or patsy.mcl@verizon.net.