In a word . . . school

Dear Katie Larkin (10) of Belclare, Co Galway,

I hope you are well. You are probably back at school by now, so my sympathies. Though it has to be said young people like you seem to really enjoy school these days compared to me and my contemporaries when we were 10.

Most of us really, really hated it.

In my own case it was not so bad because I was a boring “good” boy. That was fine in the early years but then we moved to Ballaghaderreen where I began attending the De La Salle Brothers boys school when I was the same age as you are now.

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Once again, being a goody-two-shoes (one left, one right, both properly laced), I was generally spared the rod. Though not entirely. It made no difference. The terror was all pervasive. We learned through fear, driven by anxiety, never sure of escaping a beating.

I used wonder then how bad life must be when people said schooldays were the best days of your life. I would learn that too was just another adult fiction, like “hard work never killed anyone” (never tried it but was warned by examples), or “you must speculate to accumulate” (I did and am still losing), or “the Rossies will win Sam Maguire this year” (it has never happened in my lifetime!).

Such privations have not made a stone of my heart however, so I felt your pain last month when you chided this newspaper in a letter to the editor for carrying a back-to-school advertisement days after you got your summer holidays.

I understood your “utter horror and disgust” at having to read such threatening literature while “eating breakfast”. Too bad at any time.

It was indeed “completely shocking”. So I admired the generosity of your proposal “that back-to-school advertising over three weeks before school starts should most definitely be illegal”. Three weeks? I would not allow it up to three days before schools reopened.

Ombudsman for Children Niall Muldoon should get on the case now and have this appalling cruelty to children stopped immediately. No 10-year-old should have her school holidays so utterly spoiled so soon after they began, and by the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.

Yours sincerely,

Patsy

School, a place of instruction, from Old English scol, Latin schola, Greek skhole.

inaword@irishtimes.com