St Andrews College is a high-profile fee-paying secondary school for boys and girls in Booterstown in south Dublin. It would not be unfair to call it an elite school. With students from 37 countries, it is also the Republic's only truly international school, well known for its model UN assemblies and the number of its students who go to leading British, US and Irish universities.

However, its headmaster, Arthur Godsil, has something on his mind other than its academic prowess. He is concerned about the growing number of his students who, even with a 10-to-one pupil-teacher ratio, one of the State's lowest, are unable to deal with the basic demands of a second-level syllabus and timetable.

He says the school provides a significant amount of personalised support for children with what are called "specific learning difficulties". These cover the reading and information decoding problems of those children with dyslexia, and other pupils' difficulties with concentration, attention, sequential learning, verbal reasoning and comprehension.

Stressing that his comments are in no way scientific, but based on 22 years spent observing children as principal and teacher, Mr Godsil wonders if the way children are being raised in the Ireland of the 1990s is "inhibiting their academic and social development."

He mentions as possible contributory factors the pressures on working parents; the impact of marital problems; the extraordinary range of leisure activities and constant entertainment available to children; the passivity of TV-dominated households; and the very high expectations children have in a newly affluent society.

Such speculations are the stuff of occasional dinner-party and pub conversations throughout most of the Western world. However, when they are voiced by the respected principal of a highly successful school, they are perhaps worthy of further examination.

A few miles further north, Paul Meaney, principal of Marian College boys' school in Sandymount, takes in a much broader social mix of students, ranging from Pearse Street to Ballsbridge and beyond.

He talks about the effect of the zapper culture - that if you don't like something on one of Ireland's 25 television channels, you zap to something else. He compares this to the teacher with his chalk and a curriculum which is delivered, in between bells and whistles, in 40-minute chunks of knowledge, to teenagers sitting in serried rows in old-fashioned classrooms designed for the industrial age. In the face of such contrasting ambiances, he concedes that students' concentration levels in class may suffer.

"When I went to school, we went to get information. Now that information is immediately available on the television, the Internet and through computers."

Increasingly, teachers have to teach youngsters how to cope with, rather than obtain, information, and this puts an enormous premium on the inspirational teacher who can teach young people how to think for themselves and enjoy knowledge, he says.

In the era of mass education - which has come to Ireland only in the past 30 years, later than the rest of the industrialised world - the ability range in second-level schools is incomparably wider than in the past. No longer does the less academic or more practical child leave school early to work on the farm or the factory or take the emigrant boat. Many slower and less well-adjusted children stay on at school until 16 and, with courses like the Leaving Certificate Applied, even to 18.

This hugely positive development has a negative side. "A few boys with constant difficulties concentrating have a much bigger effect on a class than their numbers imply," says Mr Meaney. "When they walk into a classroom the atmosphere changes immediately. One bad apple can cause wide discontent in a class group."

He also notices, and welcomes, the "absence of fear" of authority figures among modern youngsters, while admitting it often makes discipline more complex. Individualism is the ethos of today's young people, and they want to make their own decisions about what they learn, as they want to do in all other areas of their lives.

Jean Geoghegan, principal of Christ King, a large girls' secondary school in Cork, says the Irish school system is having to cope with "tremendous external pressures". Second-level schools have to guide 75 per cent of their children through the "narrow bottleneck" of the points system into third-level colleges, often in the face of "wholly unreasonable expectations" from parents.

At the same time they must help the 25 per cent of children who "just can't cope with the system" through innovative programmes like the Leaving Cert Applied.

Then there are the non-academic pressures. Teenagers don't understand that they can't do long hours of part-time work and study at the same time. Young people with the kind of "incredible consumer power" unknown to previous generations, and under pressure from their peers to be "cool", have an unprecedented opportunity to taste the "freedom and danger" of night-clubs. This is just as much the case in rural as in urban areas now.

FATHER Paul Andrews, the child psychologist and Jesuit priest, echoes Mr Meaney's wonder at the stark contrast between the tempo of the electronic home and the traditional school. He notes the "staggering speed" at which teenage boys, in particular, read and play sophisticated computer games.

He compares this with the "elephantine pace" of the classroom, with the teacher asking students to cope with the intricacies of Irish grammar or the causes of medieval wars. He finds "boredom to the level of pain" among the boys he sees who are subjected to the latter after the addictive excitement of the former.

"It's not the teacher's fault. It's just that the computer culture is so fast, and it's a speed even young boys can keep up with. You only have to know how the computer works. You don't have to know anything about Homer or Shakespeare."

Father Andrews agrees with Arthur Godsil that pressures on the modern Irish family may have a lot to do with the learning difficulties teachers are seeing in classrooms. He believes, quoting the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, that with all its tensions - indeed because of the educative tensions between its constituent members - the strong family remains the best place to bring up children to become creative and engaged human beings.

Two-thirds of his work now is with the children of separated families. Not only parental separation but fear of possible separation has a huge effect on children. "That fear is much more present than it used to be," he says.

"There is a conspiracy to deny the pain of children in these situations. Then parents are astonished later when teenagers start acting badly because they're so messed up."

He does not blame modern parents, who he says are still ready to make huge sacrifices for their children. But he does say the hectic lives parents lead these days are a major factor in a culture which is less and less child-friendly.

He is impressed at the amount of thought and ingenuity working mothers and fathers put in to carve out time to devote to child-rearing, as they juggle their timetables to fit their children's multiple activities and struggle to earn the money to pay high mortgages and household bills. The increasing distance of grandparents from the family circle does not help. There is a tendency in these strained circumstances to think mainly about providing economically for children, and neglecting their vital emotional and psychological needs.

Many children's behavioural problems are a reflection of a family that can't set limits, says Father Andrews. "The stage is reached when a child has to be taught that other people have needs. We've all seen examples of 10-year-olds who have decided to scream and scream until they get an ice-cream."

He stresses that there have been some great improvements in Irish family life in recent decades, such as the virtual end to widespread child-beating. But this has been accompanied by "an uncertainty about sanctions, with parents wondering why they can't say `No' to children."

He sees this particularly among children from more deprived areas, where television is so seductive to children that "parents often lose their nerve and allow all sorts of strange people and situations on to the screen whom they wouldn't normally admit into their sitting room."

Behind all this he sees the tensions caused by the deep contradiction between the individualism of the free-market philosophy and the requirements of family life. "The philosophy of the marketplace, a fairly new philosophy in Ireland, and one which children now are immersed in from watching the television, says anything you want is available, including lifestyles and partners.

"But you don't choose your children, you're landed with them. And children don't choose their parents. The family can only survive on a philosophy of restricted choice, of commitment."

THE deputy chief executive of the childcare organisation Barnardos, Madeleine Clarke, herself a psychologist, asks if the common-sense reactions of many parents to learning and emotional difficulties in their children are being partly "disabled" by the well-publicised interventions of experts.

The range of overlapping syndromes affecting children these days must be totally bewildering to often desperate parents. One parental leaflet about Attention Deficit Disorder, which is now generally recognised by specialists as a brain dysfunction requiring some drug treatment, warns that ADD rarely occurs alone and treating it in isolation is "like using a Band-Aid."

It lists eight other syndromes that often overlap with ADD. These range from learning problems (inattention, impulsivity, poor memory or slow cognitive processing), through Oppositional Behaviour Disorder (defiant, argues, talks back, loses temper, angry or spiteful) and Conduct Disorder (starts fights, uses weapons, physically cruel, fire-setting, lies or steals) to plain old-fashioned depression and anxiety. Boys suffer significantly more from these disorders, apart from anxiety, than girls.

Given this extraordinary range of often conflicting information and the sheer pace of modern living, Madeleine Clarke agrees with Paul Andrews that parenting is becoming "particularly challenging" in Ireland. She suspects that many children "get moments rather than time from their parents."

She believes too many parents "try to negotiate everything with children. They don't have the confidence to draw the difficult line and say: `For your sake I can't let this happen. It's not right and I'm not going to let you do it. I'm sorry you can't see that now with your limited experience'."

When 17-year-olds are drinking and not studying and effectively out of control, it can be a sign that the limits vital to caring parenting have not been drawn. Such a situation, she says, is frightening for both sides.

All the principals and psychologists singled out for particular mention the pervasive influence of what Paul Andrews calls the "sub-culture of drunkenness" among Irish teenagers. A 1995 survey showed that Irish 11- to 17-year-olds, together with their English and Danish counterparts, drink more than teenagers in 25 other European countries.

"It narrows their lives terribly," says Father Andrews. "Celebration does not mean dancing and singing now. It means going out to get drunk. It also leads to lots of unplanned pregnancies."