If the teachers' dispute has proved anything, it is that parents have short memories. It's bad enough their forgetting about all the hours put in by teachers beyond the call of duty, but worse is their forgetting about what it was like to be young.
A mantra of parents who, in the past weeks and months, have taken to the airwaves and written angry letters to the press is that teaching hours need to be increased. There are too many days off and not enough homework being handed out - the fault, apparently, of lazy teachers who don't want to mark it. As for the school day, well, it's a joke, isn't it?
An element of this criticism seems to be begrudgery - and misplaced begrudgery at that - about working conditions in the education sector. But an underlying motive, and one that is never far from being expressed, seems to be a wish to see schools adapted to better suit parents' expectations and lifestyles.
"Why can't classes go on into the evening?" these parents ask. "It's so inconvenient having to pick up the kids in the middle of the day." As for the holidays: "Sure, the kids are under my feet all the time".
The hysterical reaction of the so-called parents' groups to the loss, nay "denial", of 13 days - gasp! - of teaching this year reflects their thinking on the issue. All their talk about "the erosion of the school year" and "the need to protect our 167 teaching days" is mere double-speak for: more work for our children, please.
This, anyway, seems to be the message the Government has picked up as, sensing a popular crusade, it has signalled it will be seeking a longer school year - or some other extension of teaching hours - in return for concessions on teachers' pay. But, while this might suitably punish teachers for their alleged impertinence, will it make matters any better for students?
The short answer is no. The school day is already too long. According to OECD figures, secondary school pupils in the Republic spend an average of six hours a day in class. That's longer than any of their counterparts in Europe - one hour and 20 minutes more than in Germany and a full two hours more than in Sweden.
Think about it - or try to remember it - for a moment: six hours. Could any of those parents baying for more teaching hours maintain concentration for that length of time - day in, day out? For an answer one only has to see how working adults cope with the average conference or training seminar. By the first tea-break, they're fidgeting in their seats. By lunchtime, half will have disappeared, reckoning - with some validity perhaps - that they've reached information overload.
What's sauce for the goose, however, clearly isn't sauce for the goslings - this despite evidence to suggest that children's attention spans in general are lower than adults', and falling all the time.
Children, it must be said, have every reason to be impatient. They are living in an impatient world where, for instance, few people aged under 30 take time to write letters when they can e-mail or textmessage instead. Today's teenagers have grown up on a diet of channel-hopping, web-surfing and high-speed computer games. And yet they are expected to sit still for the best part of the day, consuming data?
The results can be seen in the upsurge in schools reporting children with learning difficulties, ranging from problems with concentration, verbal reasoning and comprehension to conditions such as attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. Educationalists disagree on a lot of things but on this there is consensus: long school days might be fine for the brightest kids but they make it more difficult for the weaker ones to keep up.
A number of countries have followed this advice and shortened the teaching day, reserving the bulk of afternoons for sport, theatre and other creative activities. The exception is the UK which, under John Major's Tory government, started publishing school league tables that contrasted teaching hours and encouraged schools to pile on the work. In an effort to further increase workloads on supposedly "pampered" youngsters, Tony Blair has since proposed a national minimum requirement of 30 minutes homework each night at primary school level and 90 minutes at secondary school level.
AT the core of Britain's thinking is that if you teach kids more, they will learn more, a notion based on the experience of Far East countries, which have the longest teaching hours in the world and also constantly top international test-score studies.
But the link between longer teaching hours and better results is far from clear. Indeed, the largest education research project, the Third International Maths and Science Study, conducted four years ago in 41 countries, found that spending more time on subjects, beyond a basic level, had no perceptible impact on exam performance. Countries such as New Zealand, for instance, where teenagers spend exceptionally long hours on maths and science lessons, performed no better than Norwegians, who spend an unusually short time on such lessons.
Many believe the high test-scores in some Asian countries have more to do with cultural differences, and particularly the greater value families there give to education. Not that high test-scores necessarily mean a better system, anyway. Some Asian countries are worried that overteaching is limiting creativity. The South Korean government recently asked schools to give pupils more homework-free days to allow for personal development.
One would think parents would have an interest in debating these issues in an effort to reduce pressures on their children. Yet there is little evidence of it. Part of the problem, one fears, is their failure to acknowledge - or remember - exactly how stressful school can be.
"But don't these young ones today have it easy," I hear parents say, "what with all them jobs out there." Alas, if only young people saw it that way. Increasing affluence means expectations are greater, and so are the challenges to one's self-esteem. Young people are meant to have their careers mapped out from their early teens. A slip-up anywhere along the route and it's a catastrophe, or so it might seem to someone whose peers are riding clear on the Celtic Tiger.
Increasing affluence has also resulted in financial pressures that previous generations never had to face. Keeping up with the fashions costs a lot more nowadays and, consequently, more pupils are engaging in part-time work outside school hours.
This point was highlighted at last week's ASTI conference by a past president of the union, Sean Higgins (not that anyone seemed to hear him over the noise created by certain parents' "representatives"). "I have experienced situations," said Higgins, "where students had to leave school before the end of class because they had to clock in at the local supermarket at four o'clock." Schools were now treated as "the playground", he said, where pupils sought to escape the strains and discipline of the workplace.
Add to this the grinds. Ten or 15 years ago, they were availed of sparingly and with caution. Today, they're treated as an essential part of secondary school education, filling whatever spare time students have between the school and the supermarket, or wherever they may be working in the evening and at weekends.
The consequences of such dawn-to-dust slogging can be seen in the rising rates of self-harming behaviour, alcohol and drug abuse and phenomena such as bingedrinking. Parents who can't understand why their children drink to get drunk should go back to their physics books and re-learn that basic principle: to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. With teenagers working harder and studying harder, it doesn't take Newton to figure out how they're going to play.
Increasing teaching hours under these conditions, however, is not just reckless - it's hypocritical. At a time when adults are beginning to learn how unhealthy long working hours can be - and are seeking concessions from their employers - they are making greater demands of their children.
This is all the more unforgivable given our recent history of systematically abusing children - physically, sexually and by neglect - in this State. To these forms of abuse, parents - individually and collectively - seem determined to add a new manner of harm: that created by the weight of their expectations.
Were they really concerned about their children's welfare, they would seek to relieve, not to add to, the strain. A first step would be to put feelings of vindictiveness or jealousy aside and shorten the school day. A second step would be to reform an education system which could rightly be described today, whatever about in Pearse's time, as the murder machine. It may be a fair system - in the sense that free market capitalism is fair - but it's certainly not humane.
Joe Humphreys can be contacted at jhumphreys@irish-times.ie
Eddie Holt is on holiday