I very much agree, Cai, with a lot of your points. I have a very well educated friend who had a child before I did and he's two years older than DS. DS will consistently give a thank you, and sometimes even a please and we don't even enforce these things - he's modelled them from us because I've asked DP to be on board with the modelling theory. But my friend's child...he's 4 and he asks for things in a demand tone and I"ve only heard him say thank you a couple of times. I'm not there all the time, so I don't know if she's modelling the desired behaviour when I'm not there, but she seems to be courteous enough with him and her DH when we're there...and she's happy enough to let it go when we're there. If my DS doesn't say thanks, I'll tell him 'you're welcome' (spanish or english, interchangeably), so that at least he's aware that there's some sort of convention in that exchange. He's too young to enforce, it, IMO, so that's my way of teaching him i.e. by example.
I really think the problem is somewhere in the fact that kids' parents are becoming a bit clueless about the things this guy was talking about, and not that they can't be bothered teaching their own kids these same things. I think he's saying that schools may have to take on board what parents have lost, so that we break the cycle of cluelessness...dunno, that's just what I take away from it.
For DS, I want him to learn about his world and hope that he wants to get stuck into the theories about things later in school and uni. But, if not, whatever he ends up doing, I want him to be happy about who he is, what he stands for and that these things count for a lot more than degrees from uni, even in the eyes of a mummy who does have a couple of degrees and knows that they dont' define her as a person.