End of an Era

You may or may not know that The Dear Handbrake is a foreign language teacher.  As a dedicated deliverer of alien culture and wisdom from beyond the shores of this fair land to her charges, it has befallen to her for many years now to encourage and facilitate the noble art of writing letters to pen friends.  She has just received and delivered this year's crop of contact details from IYS (International Youth Service) in Finland.  Along with the contact details was a short note (below).
Which is all a bit sad really.

Comments

[Julie]

I can recall this sort of service when I was in early High School (1961). I had penpals in the UK, in France and two in the USA. I used to write letters every week to someone and had to save to pay for the stamps myself.

Young people nowadays do not know how to write a letter - nay, they do not know how to write a sentence. And as for spelling - texting has corrupted that totally. Strange that this is a generation that communicates more than any other but it is usually in grunts like "cool".

[Mr D]

You have to wonder if they couldn't have just changed how they work. OK, so the tool of communication has changed, but the Internet's a big place. The young people still need to find other young people to write to, even if it's now by e-mail and possibly instant messaging. Besides, there'll continue to be some students who like to put pen to paper literally.

I suppose there must already be websites who set up the contacts, yeah? Were IYS too slow to get with it, then?

Julie: Have you seen how poorly so many people of all ages write?

[IanH]

Yes, Julie, it's very much quantity over quality these days !

I think IYS missed the boat, Mr D, there's probably a niche market for 'filtered' penfriends to keep dodgy people out of the system but under the flood of instant emails, messenger, MySpace etc the concept would probably sink without trace.

[jeanie]

I don't remember if it was IYS, but I remember a similar scheme in the 80s when I was at school.

At boarding school.

A a girls boarding school.

We all ticked the countries we wanted our fantasy boyfriend - ahem - penfriends from and sent off our $8 each (I think that was the price).

The only thing consistant about all applications were we wanted boys!!!

Every one of us got girls - twice as many girls as we applied for. Only one got a boy, and he was from USA - no fun at all.

Pity they couldn't morph with the times.

And no - I was a bad penfriend and the correspondence all petered out after a year - when we could actually see live boys a few times a year at school socials and send them letters...

[carolina]

How do I write to IYS penfriends?
Anyone interested to stay in touch now that I found out IYS business closed down after 56 years.

Surprised news!!