These young people are perhaps not as ill-done-by as they believe they are. It is true that with school closed and their friends all over the place and nothing to do but hang around the house all day they're threatened with boredom and loneliness. But even when most mothers were stayat-home mothers, teenagers who were too young to work and too old to be sent out to play had no option but to suffer long stretches of apparently aimless time. The thing is: being bored is not all bad. Mightn't a certain amount of forced introspection lay down inner resources for the future? Mightn't it redress, a little bit, the overstimulation of middle-class children who've grown up never alone and never unentertained?

The summer problem is not only about individual families but about changes in society which the educational establisment has failed to address. It is simply astonishing that the shape of the school year has stayed the same even though everything else has changed.

Above all, mammies have changed. The slashand-burn era of Irish childrearing, where misery was not a recognised emotional state and there were no mobile phones or worldwide internets or iPods or television sets, and children caught reading a book had it snatched out of their hands on the grounds that they should be doing something useful, is over.

That is a vanished world, of which the school day and school holidays are some of the few reminders. It absolutely does not make sense, in a society where more and more married women have entered the work force, to close down all first-, second- and third-level education for at least two months in the summer (minor events like summer schools excepted). It does not make practical sense to leave all the buildings with all their resources locked up for months on end. Nobody bothers to mention it with any conviction because of the strength of the teachers' unions . . . who famously throw up leaders so confrontational that you can't help but wonder what ever attracted them to work with children . . . but there is no objective reason for the teaching year to remain the shape it is.

And not just the shape, but the nature and purpose of education should be under radical revision in our radically new Ireland. Because we owe teaching not only to the teenage children of busy parents but to many other people in need. For example, the asylum seekers who are corralled here and there around the country on a pitiable weekly allowance urgently need lengthy classes, not just in language and culture but in subjects that will feed their minds. Our immigrant labour force, too, should be able to attend classes in English and many other subjects at times that suit their hardworking lifestyles. Places on certain Fas courses should be linked to learning as well as training . . . by invitation but with clear rewards in sight. Older people, who in their day had to leave school at 14, could be actively invited . . .

seduced . . . by their ever-open local school to enjoy the learning experience life has so far deprived them of.

The bored pre-adolescents hanging around outside locked school premises are a reminder that human beings have needs that just being fed and clothed don't meet. Last year, I was honoured with a doctorate by the Open University in the UK. The ceremony was part of a general conferring and as I sat on the platform I watched people graduating who had taken years and years to get through to this moment . . . conventional students, many of them, but also old people, handicapped people, father-anddaughter combinations, husbands and wives, sisters, black, brown and yellow-skinned people, people who were clearly quite poor, and glamorous people.

We could start this kind of parallel education early by in the first place hardly ever closing the schools. We have the wealth to do it. If the teachers say, 'Hey, come on, we're exhausted by the time summer comes around and we need that couple of months off to survive, ' fine. Let them manage as they do. But open up the job of teaching, if not the profession.

Because just as there are new learners around, there are new teachers: people who would flourish in a classroom free of the constraints of curriculums, parttime teachers, teachers using new methods and new material, teachers who don't have conventional qualifications, housewife teachers, farmer teachers, people who simply desire to teach.

With them, it would be possible to keep the teenagers away from the bus shelters. School would have its seasons of informality and fun.

It is within the bounds of possibility to keep our educational plant humming all day and evening and all year round, as if education were a social necessity, like light and water.

Which, as a matter of fact, not just visionaries but the most hardheaded economists say that it is.