There can be no doubt the dispute by the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland has been a disaster from the teachers' point of view. They failed to win their battle against benchmarking and in the process they not only antagonised other trades unions and the general population, they also antagonised parents and pupils.
The attempt to use the Leaving Certificate exam as a lever to force the Government to concede their demand for exemption from benchmarking was simply too much for their partners in the secondary education system. We don't know what will be the outcome of the ballot after their Easter conference, but whether the teachers reject or accept the Labour Court proposals, it seems clear they will now cooperate on the examination. That crisis is over.
What we are left with, however, is a dangerously unsatisfactory outcome in terms of the alienation of our secondary teachers, who clearly feel bruised by their experience and are apprehensive about their future relationship with parents and pupils.
Some may even be tempted to seek an alternative career. The whole affair may make it even more difficult, in the short term at least, to recruit to this crucial profession. Moreover, the persistence of a sour atmosphere within the secondary school system would make it more difficult for desirable changes to be introduced, as this would depend on teacher co-operation.
What is needed in the months ahead is a more positive public attitude towards the secondary teaching profession. However strongly many may deplore the manner in which the teachers pursued their claim, in particular the attitude their leaders led them to adopt towards the Leaving, it must surely be realised that this body of professionals would not have taken such extreme, and ultimately counter-productive, measures unless they were deeply dissatisfied with their situation.
The secondary teachers' cause was not helped by the way some attempted to justify their pay claim by reference to the high earnings of some of their recent pupils who had entered the IT sector. Highlighting envy as a motivating force never creates a positive impression. But behind all this lay a sense that, in an increasingly individualistic society where material success has come to play such a big role among children as among many parents, their profession was becoming devalued.
MOREOVER, despite what is often said about long school holidays, even under favourable conditions teaching is a demanding profession. As those who have taught at any level will know realise, teaching is an exhausting activity. The working conditions of many schoolteachers have deteriorated in recent years. Quite a few, in both rural and urban areas, have been finding their authority persistently flouted by some pupils. In some cases their physical safety is even at risk. These teachers have been bearing the brunt of the failure of some parents to bring up their children to respect others.
When people in any walk of life come to feel devalued in this way, they become vulnerable to a populist element in their own ranks. We may feel that teachers should be immune to such emotions, that they should know better. But they are as human as the rest of us, with the same capacity for self-deception.
We need to recognise that it was the effectiveness of our education system that won spectacular economic opportunities for so many children of the 1990s. Of course, even if we had not been able to offer the services of a well-educated labour force, our low corporate taxes would no doubt have attracted some high-tech industries to our shores.
But anyone who has had occasion to interrogate managers of such firms on why so many of them located here will know that our success in attracting one-quarter of all new US investments in Europe has rested on the high motivation, flexibility and adaptability of our school-leavers and university graduates.
That the school-leavers of the 1990s have been so successful is not because our schools are well-resourced by the State - few of them compare with schools in Northern Ireland in this respect - but because the students were taught by motivated teachers.
That motivation derived from a combination of the respect in which teachers were traditionally held in Irish society and the fact that they were well paid. They were among the best-paid in Europe - and well paid also compared to other sectors in Ireland.
But because of the success of claims in recent years by some public service groups with which teachers traditionally compared themselves, they consider themselves to have fallen behind in pay terms.
In other countries intrusions into the education system by market forces has occurred through attempts to treat education like a commercial activity. In the United Kingdom, for example, universities have suffered from a mechanistic attempt to link funding of departments directly to the quantity - but not necessarily the quality - of items of research undertaken.
Teachers here have feared the intrusion of such an approach into the evaluation of their performance. That fear may be unreasonable - and it is fair to say they have unwisely failed to pre-empt such mechanistic approaches to evaluation by devising a more appropriate system of their own. But the fear is real, and not without some foundation.
If our education system is to continue to yield the kind of results it gave us in the closing years of the 20th century, our teachers will have to be paid above, not below, the norm for people with their qualifications.
Like it or not, it is through pay that our materialistic society increasingly evaluates contributions to that society. In this and other ways teachers must be helped to recover their sense of self-worth, temporarily damaged by the cul-de-sac into which they recently allowed themselves to be led.
Only a teaching force confident of its role in society can lead the many changes that will be needed if Irish education is to retain, and further develop, its capacity to ensure a continuation of the success of recent years.
gfitzgerald@irish-times.ie