CONNECT/Eddie Holt: Minister for Education Noel Dempsey is one of 28 former (or, depending on the electorate, perhaps just temporarily reprieved) teachers in the current Dáil. He used to be a career guidance teacher and evidently was an astute and wide-awake one.
It's clear he could see there was a limited future in a teaching career, so he guided himself into full-time politics.
Earlier this week he featured in an RTÉ television news story. Standard, stiffly-posed file footage of a Government minister in an opulent Government Buildings office showed him behind an ornate, presumably Haughey-era desk. The story then cut to a Dublin classroom, a spartan, depressing, possibly pre-fab place. The contrast confirmed that he knows about career moves.
In a week when a MORI survey revealed that one in three teachers in England expects to quit the job within five years, Dempsey and the Association of Secondary Teachers, Ireland (ASTI) have been in conflict. The problems - endless paperwork, pupil behaviour, an ill-fitting "target-driven" culture - that are driving out teachers in England may, in time, do likewise here.
"Everybody is overwhelmed with paperwork and bureaucracy and targets and this isn't right," said Carol Adams, the chief executive of England's General Teaching Council (GTC). Adams and a vast majority of teachers believe the British government is far too interfering - "meddling" is the term they use - and disrespectful of them.
In fact, teachers in England feel that only the media is more disrespectful of them and their work than the government.
With such powerful forces against them, many feel defeated. One in three say they would not go into teaching if they had the time again and more than half (56 per cent) report ever-declining morale.
"Few other professions have to contend with the fact that everyone considers themselves an expert on your patch and feels entitled to tell you so," added Adams. It must be because everybody has been to school, that all feel entitled to an opinion about teaching.
The English survey is particularly intriguing because fewer than one in nine teachers (11 per cent) listed pay among the top three demotivating factors. It's not as if teachers in England are lavishly paid. At secondary level, their starting salaries are £17,595 (€27,000), which is 15 per cent lower than Britain's average graduate starting pay of £20,300 (€31,230).
Still, for almost nine in every 10, pay is not considered one of the major drawbacks of a teaching career. The impediments to the nominal core activity of imparting knowledge are what most depress teachers. Time was when a good teacher was somebody who could engage pupils by making even dry academic material seem appealing. The best ones could even be inspirational, sparking students to use their imaginations and learn for themselves.
Now, however, given education's vapid, box-ticking culture, a good teacher in government terms is likely to be an anally-retentive bureaucrat. "Never mind the quality, fill the form" increasingly defines education. Granted, at second-level, box-ticking remains worse in England than in Ireland but the principle is becoming entrenched throughout all layers of Irish education.
As with farmers and nurses, for instance, teachers' status continues to plummet like the grades of a student who has taken to the bottle. Relative position in society (or nowadays, in an economy) is never cast in stone and that's fair enough. Priests and other clergy have, because of church scandals, plummeted even more spectacularly and the traditional association between education and clergy can't have helped teachers.
None the less, despite major societal changes, Irish teachers continue to work within a very hierarchical system. Education here always has been authoritarian and continues to be a primary (and secondary!) instrument of official propaganda.
Teachers know they are expected to uphold values which are increasingly at odds with the world in which they and their pupils live.
That world offers more competing influences and authorities than ever, particularly because of the so-called Information Age's media explosion. Indeed, media depictions of teachers tend to be either unflattering or ludicrously sentimental. At local level, Fair City's Barry O'Hanlon is decent but monumentally boring, a combination which apparently makes him ideal to become a headmaster.
For its part, Hollywood offers the triumphal sentimentality of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and the idiotic Dangerous Minds cast Michelle Pfeiffer as a glamour babe able to sort out the kids in the 'hood. No wonder the MORI poll showed that 86 per cent of teachers in England feel the media gives them little or no respect. It doesn't.
A similar survey has not been done in Ireland but, at least among ASTI members, a comparable figure would not surprise.
It's difficult not to conclude that the current spat between the ASTI and the Minister is about more than rival interpretations of a supervision/substitution deal. There is a whiff of deeper ideological concerns.
In fact, the quibbling over a deal detail sounds academic in the worst sense. The ASTI dispute with the government, always tactically inept but conceptually legitimate, hasn't gone away, you know. All along, it's been a battle for society's sense of values, even if such a notion in coarse New Ireland is typically dismissed as mere intellectual trainspotting.
Who knows which side is right regarding the deal detail? More alarmingly however, Ireland seems on course to replicate Britain's disastrous diminishment of teaching and its decreasing retention levels of teachers. You've got to wonder if former career guidance teacher Dempsey would advise young people to become teachers now. Discuss (with reference to common sense).