I was once a student revolutionary

Classes may have been few and far between this week, but secondary-school students will have learned two valuable lessons, nonetheless. On Tuesday, when they walked out of their classrooms in a wave of spontaneous demonstrations, they discovered they have a voice.

On Wednesday, when a hastily arranged national demonstration in Dublin fizzled out in the miserable rain, they learned that a voice not amplified by old-fashioned organisation doesn't get heard for very long.

The QED is obvious: if they want to be treated as partners in the education system rather than as the mere objects of other people's decisions, they need a union.

Now and then, amid all the excited chatter on the airwaves as the media discovered that school students could talk and argue and make demands, the idea of a formal organisation was mentioned. It was canvassed as a good idea that no one had quite thought of before. In fact, it was tried before, and it did have some success. I know this because I was a member of its standing committee for three years.

The Irish Union of School Students was founded in 1972. It had taken that long for the wave of student militancy to wash up on Ireland's shores and then to seep down into second-level schools. Out of the general ferment of teenage radicalism, some of it mere fashion, some seriously political, emerged a precocious organisational genius called Tony Kinsella.

He knew things most school students didn't: how to get an office and a phone, how to raise a few quid, how to operate a clunky old Gestener machine that he magicked up from somewhere.

Above all, in the early days, he knew how to convince the media that you actually represent a mass movement so that a small bunch of self-appointed people can generate the publicity that might eventually turn its pose into a reality.

The union never became a mass organisation of second-level students. But it did have something like a national structure, with healthy branches in schools from Dublin to Galway and from West Cork to Donegal. Outraged fulminations from the Catholic Truth Society and from the columnist John D Sheridan helped to spread the word.

The union made links with the ASTI, with parents' bodies, and especially with the Union of Students in Ireland, which offered it a home and a modicum of financial support. It campaigned effectively on one issue in particular: the eventual outlawing of corporal punishment undoubtedly owed something to the union.

Perhaps its most important achievement was in proving teenagers were perfectly capable of running national and even an international organisation without adult supervision or interference.

We ran our own campaigns, organised our own meetings, wrote our own reports. We even put together an international convention with delegates from the UK, France, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, funded by the Council of Europe and intended as a launching pad for a pan-European school student movement.

If nothing else, the union showed school students do not need to be patronised and patted on the head by older people who think they know what is in their best interests. As today's school students have learned to their cost in recent months, the other players in the education system have their own agendas.

Sometimes, those agendas coincide with those of the pupils. Sometimes, as in the ASTI's decision to target State exams rather than face the hardship of an all-out strike, they don't. The school students' union, by its very existence, implied that trusting other people to look out for you is not always the best policy for young people.

That the whole thing petered out by around 1979 suggests the most obvious difficulty for a school student union. Its membership is, by definition, transient. And it can't keep an organisational continuity by hiring long-term officials. What 21-year-old wants to be working for a bunch of school kids?

The union ultimately failed because the people who established it moved on and, in the harsher economic climate of the late 1970s, the obsession with the points race discouraged their successors from spending their evenings writing reports and printing leaflets.

This, in turn, suggests the need for some kind of institutional support. This week's demonstrations raise a question that has not been asked for at least 20 years. If teachers, parents, the State, and religious orders can all be accepted as partners in the education system, why can't the people for whom it is supposedly designed - the students?

PARADOXICALLY, while the language of partnership has taken hold and the need to treat the people who avail of State services as "clients" who must be respected and consulted has been - at least in theory - universally recognised, the voice of school students has become far quieter than it was 30 years ago. Except, perhaps, for patients in the public health service, pupils are the last big group of stakeholders in the system of State provision whom no one even pretends to consult.

This is not just a side issue. What happens in a system where the people who use it are regarded as the mere objects of other people's wisdom is that the service providers capture the system itself. If anything good has come out of the grim debacle of the ASTI's campaign, it is the way it has demonstrated this truth in Irish education.

The people who own the system - teachers, the State and, to a lesser extent, parents - are left to fight it out among themselves while the people for whom it is supposedly run are caught in the middle. As soon as they force their way into the headlines, as they did this week, the nature of the debate changes radically.

It is surely time, then, for the Department of Education to show how seriously it takes the ideal of partnership that it is urging on the ASTI and to give school students the help they need to set up their own representative structures on a national basis.

This could be done through the National Youth Council, USI, or any other structure that makes sense to school students themselves. Some very articulate, confident and capable young people emerged this week to voice the concerns of their peers.

Is it too wildly radical an idea in a State that never stops talking about how much it prizes the youth to ask them what they want?

fotoole@irish-times.ie