HE'S NOT afraid of the principal, moaned a parent to me about her troublesome, disruptive boy. I had sent the said boy to our principal for a dressing-down, because, unlike Mary Coughlan, I wasn't getting through to him.

Now I find that I have another problem on my hands, namely a parent who wants to go back to the dark ages when pupils feared their teacher.

Sadly, this parent would not be alone in harbouring this crazy idea. More sadly still, she and the others of her ilk were the ones who shouted loudest to have corporal punishment abolished.

However, now that it is a thing of the past - and as it has not been satisfactorily replaced by any other device - the youth of the nation are tyrannising parents and teachers alike and nobody is prepared to shout `stop'.

We were long enough under the yoke of the cane, the strap, the beatings, the tears, the torture. We are now in the enlightened age, when children no longer are afraid coming to school. They have centrally-heated buildings and visually stimulating classrooms and kind, caring teachers.

But are they content? No, no, no. The children, like Oliver, want more, the parents want them to have less, and the teacher is caught in the middle. The parents now want us to instill fear into their offspring, so that their children will do what they are told at home and stop tyrannising their parents.

No point in appealing my case at the bench of the aforementioned principal. He is weary from not getting to parents. It seems that, like the drink and drugs, all parents agree that the problem is widespread - but it's always someone's else's children who are the guilty ones.

Mrs Hennelly is so incensed about another matter that she has become incommunicado, and sometimes drinks her coffee alone in her room. She has recently employed a home-help to do some light household chores for her, now that she is advancing rapidly towards the magic age of 55. They can afford it; her children are grown up and gone their diverse ways, she is entitled to a little pampering at her age. We all agree.

But, horror of horrors, she is, at present, obliged to do, free, gratis and for nought, and in her own time, what she herself is paying someone to do in her own home.

The irony of it. Is the nation aware of all that we, teachers, do in the interest of democracy and the education of the masses?