At a dream auction, people bid on services as diverse as lawn-mowing or making a will, or receiving a home-baked cake every week for a month. It is a social and fund-raising occasion, where the idea is to put forward services which don't cost you very much except time, but which someone else would love, writes Breda O'Brien.
I did not know that until a buff-coloured leaflet arrived from my children's primary school, Lios na nÓg. Since we got it, I cannot get out of my head a vision of the hard-working teachers in that school in their previous incarnation as students.
As they earnestly swotted up on educational methodology and developmental psychology, did they have any inkling that the module they would most require in the future did not feature on any teacher-training college curriculum?
A short course on running fairs, table quizzes, race nights, ceilis, concerts, and let's not forget dream auctions, would appear to be essential for teachers, although oddly, begging for money does not appear on any job description from the Department of Education.
What Gandhi once said about Western civilisation, that he thought it would be a good idea, might just as easily be said of free education in Ireland. Teachers at primary level, along with dedicated parents, spend an enormous amount of time fund-raising just to keep schools open and functioning.
That may just about work in areas where parents can afford to be squeezed for another few bob, but think about disadvantaged areas, where the extra resources allocated to them only emphasise how much more needs to be done to tackle inequality.
How often do primary-level teachers ask themselves if an active career as a fund-raiser was really the reason they spent four years qualifying to teach? Not to mention the so-called voluntary subscription which practically every school has to collect, and the cost of textbooks and stationery to parents. If this is free education, I would hate to see expensive education.
Nor does it stop at primary level. At second level, the non-fee paying voluntary sector often limps along with inadequate secretarial and support staff, lack of space and primitive facilities.
Aside from these constraints, let's look at Transition Year. To me, it is the shining gem in our education system, where pupils learn painlessly all sorts of invaluable things about life, work and themselves. Yet many schools have to charge hundreds of euro for the programme.
Along with the fact that taking part means students have to spend another year in education before earning an income, the result is that those who would most benefit are least likely to participate.
The enormous fuss about the reintroduction of fees at third level shows how skewed our priorities are. There are children being educated at first and second level in Third World conditions, and aside from the teachers and parents directly involved, no one appears to give a stuff. Free third-level education should never have been introduced in the first place, and it is to Labour's shame that they were responsible, or should that be irresponsible?
Among the beneficiaries of the abolition of fees are people who happily pay fees for their children at second level, not to mention the cost of numerous expensive grinds, but who now receive the same treatment as the poorest parent. Instead of abolishing fees, extremely generous grants and a flexible and sensitive system of means-testing should have been introduced.
There is much anecdotal evidence that grants were and are abused by the few who can fiddle their income figures so that they qualify on paper for grants to which they are not entitled. For everybody else, grants are miserably inadequate.
It is bizarre to see Labour and the Progressive Democrats lining up on the same self-righteous anti-fees side. Does either of those parties have a constructive vision of education to put forward? All that seems to worry the Progressive Democrats is keeping their wealthy voter base happy.
Niamh Breathnach as a Labour minister for education merrily introduced new and compulsory subjects at second level while airily proposing the abolition of history as a core subject. No doubt that would diminish the possibility of reminding people of the 1916 proclamation which promised to cherish all the children of the nation equally, or of remembering what's-his-name-again. Oh yes, Connolly. As for Fine Gael, the last decent minister for education they had was Dick Bourke.
So am I with Noel Dempsey on the reintroduction of fees? In theory, yes, but in practice, just maybe. I do not doubt his integrity, given his stance on the dual mandate. Despite the fact that I believe Noel Dempsey to be sincere about increasing access to third level, he is just one voice in Government.
Successive governments have shown contempt for education and for those who work in it. I do not trust this Government, or any other government that I can envisage getting elected in the next decade, to do the right thing about university fees, or for that matter, much else in education.
This Government failed to support education when the economic climate was far healthier. Nothing persuades me that it will begin to do so now. If fees are initially reintroduced for the wealthy, will it stay that way, or will the income threshold get lower and lower? What chance is there that the reintroduction of fees will be accompanied by initiatives necessary to encourage participation by the working classes?
Access to education must begin at pre-school level in areas of poverty, and work its way through. When it comes to third level, priority should be given to the kind of bright young people who due to poverty have more chance of being accepted for a place on a space shuttle than they have of being able to attend a third-level institution. This does not mean, by the way, that the much-maligned middle classes must be penalised once again. By all means let the wealthy pay, but the mortgaged-to-the-hilt middle classes on modest incomes are not wealthy. No doubt this debate will drag on.