`Parents don't engage with their children any more. They buy them off with videos, computer games cinema tickets, designer track suits and Man United kits."

Our priomh oide is philosophical, yet despondent. "They don't read with them, they don't converse with them. They have, sadly, become enslaved by them."

It's not usual for him to be so negative, so downbeat, so dispirited. But we all know the reason for his uncharacteristic outburst. His present sixth-class pupils are predominantly indolent, impertinent, disinterested, intransigent and intellectually challenged. We, his "assistants", who have each in turn tried unsuccessfully to work a minor miracle on them as they climbed the educational ladder, are understanding, yet vaguely unsympathetic.

He continues: "They don't explain matters to them or reason with them or connect with them. Maybe they don't even communicate with them."

Now, if the children in question were in an inner-city school or from a deprived area or products of broken homes or from the flats, we would all understand and be resigned to their fate and our fate and the fate of our priomh oide. But, horror of horrors, these very pupils are country boys and girls of good farming stock, born and bred far from the madding crowd, breathing the pure, fresh, unpolluted air of the boglands and meadows which surround them. However, agriculture is now an exciting and high-tech business which is decidedly child-friendly. Gone are the days when boys and girls alike were expected to do farm chores every morning before school; now our rural pupils talk of tractors which cost a teacher's full year's salary.

And so, our rustic swains, unaware of the gravity of their academic state, spend their days in bucolic bliss while our beloved priomh oide tears his hair out in frenzied frustration. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.