A recent article in The Times (June 2) jimmied open the sewer grate of my memory and sent me tumbling down its greasy depths to suffer fumes and stenches long ago thought forgotten. “Experts say most students need not attend private lessons,” ran the article, arguing that schoolchildren were wasting time on private lessons that could be better spent on recreation. Talk about stating the obvious. I attended a prominent Jesuit school for the whole period optimistically referred to as my “secondary and tertiary education”, so who better qualified to add captions and liner notes to this article’s subject matter?

The years spent in school are a poisoned chalice for the child who takes his “education” seriously and who doesn’t understand the shambolic contradictions and conflicts of interest that drive it along. “Education” as propagated by the academies of intellectual dystrophy known as schools and colleges is no different a concept than a consortium of farmers parading their fattest heifer, or a bevy of bubble-headed blondes comparing implants. It is with the same competitive mindset that a child feels compelled to attend private lessons and inflate his grades as much as he can. It is not through a desire to become an individual with a mind of his own, to develop a fully-fledged and incorruptible sense of self, or to be able to tell life-affirming truth apart from marketed reality, but merely to jack up his grade average and live down the illusion that this makes him “smarter and a cut above his peers”.

Scratch all you will, but school education does not go any deeper than this, and private lessons merely accelerate the degenerative process by hastening the route to that coveted chequered flag, the holy grail every doting mother wants to condemn her young to: a lucrative job. By the time you get there and discover that the lush oasis publicised in the brochures only yields rotten fruit, it is – of course – too late to do anything about it, and this is what educational institutions bank on; your resentment and frustration getting the better of your desire to spare others your own fate. “Why not enjoy their misfortune when it has also been your own?” whispers the vizier’s voice, and many are those who pay it heed, even when it is their own blood who is on the chopping block.

I was there all along when my schoolteachers would spend their assigned lectures in school correcting homework from their private lessons, and when others hold back from teaching the proper syllabus to “encourage” students to attend their private lessons and get complete coverage at discounted rates.

What’s the price of peace of mind when everybody’s safety net is being torn to shreds and every child’s waking moment is consumed by fear of “not making it?” A few hundred euros a month and most of their afternoons cooped up in cramped basements and garages, it seems.

But criticising private lessons doesn’t quite cut it.

They are a mere excrescence and far from being the source of the problem. That’s going to take a lot more digging to unearth, and will reveal sights and smells far more difficult to live with than any I’ve just revealed; using the sort of self-analysis – one should add – entirely and actively discouraged by our educational system.

I am one little fish that has escaped their net.