Parental school-day blues

Our daughter Roisín started school this week - a traumatic event, as you can imagine. There were the inevitable tears and, even worse, the little sad face as we left the classroom. But that was just my wife, and she pulled herself together eventually and stopped embarrassing us. Roisín and me were fine.

Like her, many children starting school these days are veterans of the crèche and play-school system, so they take to full-time education like troopers. In fact, if you witnessed an emotional scene outside a Dublin school this week, it was probably a commuter weeping with frustration over the return of thousands of parents to the roads. For the school-goers themselves, the first day is just not the crisis it used to be.

When I started school in the mid-1960s it was a harrowing experience. We were like refugees forced to flee overnight from our motherland (The People's Republic of Childhood), which had come under sudden, unprovoked attack from the forces of reality.

Massing at the borders, still dazed, we were housed in an emergency camp called "Low Infants", where the teachers - I thought they were foreign-aid workers - were very nice. But any prospect of a return to our former lives soon vanished. Worst of all was the realisation that our parents would not be joining us in this new adventure, because they had to stay at home with the younger children.

There were distressing scenes in the school-yard as we said goodbye to our loved ones. I remember biting my lip and trying to be strong, for the sake of the women. But this is a false memory, apparently; my mother says I bawled for a week.

As psychologists remind us, children can have exaggerated - but to them very real - fears about school. When I was starting, for example, Civil-War politics still smouldered in Ireland. I didn't know much about it, but I knew I'd been born into a Fianna Fáil household (they marked our doors with large Xs). And I remember one dreadful day when men came to our school, picked out boys from known Fianna Fáil families, and took us outside to be shot.

Only by a newspaper photographer, it turned out. But even so. As I recall it, there was an election going on - the 1966 presidential campaign, presumably - and someone thought it would be a cute idea. They gave us little cards saying "Vote de Valera". Then they lined us up against a wall, and shot us, repeatedly. Not that I'm not complaining: my father was a county councillor, so I knew the risks.

I've checked with my mother, and she thinks I made that photo-shoot up. But although the details are hazy, the event left an indelible impression. I'm reminded of the words of a famous man who once said "education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten". The name of the famous man escapes me, but I think that just proves his point.

Like Irish election campaigns, children have become more sophisticated in the intervening decades. Still, we were on standby this week to give Roisín any reassurance she needed. But so far she seems to be thrilled with school, and any separation trauma has been eased by the fact that, for the moment, she's more emotionally involved with her uniform than with either of her parents.

In fact, her only worry has been the curriculum. The first day's session was predictably gentle, and divided into two modules: playtime and the distribution of lollipops.

As we walked home afterwards, Roisín was concerned at whether this low-intensity approach was an adequate preparation for life. School was fun, she said, "but I didn't learn much". So the early indications are that my daughter is a swot. All I can say is, she didn't get it from her parents.

Such is the glamour of education in our house lately that her baby brother was feeling left out and, on his insistence, we bought him a school-bag like Roisín's. Thus it was that he marched off to begin play-school this week with a rucksack on his back 12 times bigger than the lunch it carried. The main thing is, he's happy.

Everybody's happy, in fact, although there was a moment mid-week when, between school runs, I found myself growing a little emotional. I knew I was emotional because I experienced a flush of nostalgia for Barney, the fun-loving but adenoidal dinosaur who has been part of our mornings for so long. Then I checked the TV schedules and realised he's still on in the afternoons; so it looks like we're stuck with the big purple b****** for several years yet.