I WENT to school at Blackrock College from 1976 to 1981. I remember the extraordinarily skilful teaching of Geraldine FitzGerald (Latin), Sean Byrne (English), Barry O'Keefe (History) and Aine O'Leary (Irish), among others. These were people who loved what they taught and who shared what they knew with the most immensely touching generosity of spirit. In this, they were born educators. (Educare -- to lead out.)

Yes, they'd help you get your points, if that's what you wanted, but they were interested in taking you on an adventure of the mind, to some country where Aer Lingus couldn't take you. They knew that it is a revolutionary thing to teach people to think. Also, they tried to instil in us a living and vibrant sense that the purpose of an education is to become a better person, and, by implication, more fully a citizen.

This sense of the importance of solidarities was underlined by the daily presence among us of men who had lived and worked in the developing world, in some cases among the very poorest of the poor. Their service had been part of a religious and spiritual commitment, but they had other perspectives, too, and I found those fascinating and challenging. (The first time I ever heard the word "apartheid", for example, was in conversation with a priest in my school.)

I sometimes wondered what they felt about the materialist empty-headedness that was already beginning to wreak its baleful influence on my country and my city, and I am sorry, now, that I didn't ask them more often -- but they had ways of letting you know, all the same.

As with any group, perhaps especially an all-male one, the community had its quota of human frailty and eccentricity, but I think it is true to say that I never saw a priest in Blackrock College behave with cruelty or malice. And I saw many of them behave with extraordinary kindliness and tact, sometimes in the face of complexity.

It was an era in which teenagers became less controllable than previously and the models for education were becoming less authoritarian. It must have been a difficult enough adjustment for some of the priests (and other teachers), but many of them managed it with grace and great wisdom, and with the tolerant humour of those who have seen the world's insanities and who can recognise grandiosities when they meet them.

I now see that their forbearance must have been hard to attain. Many were men of remarkable courage and intellectual curiosity too, and if some were as poorly suited to teaching adolescent boys as I myself would be, they nevertheless gave it everything they had, and I am thankful.

I may add, and this is strange -- or perhaps it is not -- that I am especially grateful to the teachers who tried so hard and failed, whose gifts belonged to some other realm than the Seventies' classroom. There is a heroism in trying to exceed whatever capabilities you have, and in turning up bravely every day.

The tougher and harsher teachers were almost all not priests. One or two seemed not to like young people in any way you could see, which made their choice of career difficult to fathom. But some of us, as noted previously, could be hard enough to like.

The view was beginning to arise among certain factions of the student body that an education was a thing you had happen to you, like the appearance of stubble on your chin, not something you might have to do a little work for. (God feeds the birds, as the old joke goes, but he doesn't drop the worms in their beaks.) Certain boys seemed to regard themselves as customers, not students, and I felt the teachers deserved better than that.

But this is where the issue becomes multifaceted, of course. In a value system that esteems victory above all other outcomes, a brutalising need for accomplishment can be inculcated over time.

There was a lot of good talked in the school about sport, for example, and there was a fabulous amount of nonsense too. But I am thankful that some of the teachers, and some of my fellow misfits, contributed to whatever adolescent sense I already had -- that the playing of rugby does not by itself connote moral or ethical pre-eminence.

Like anyone who went to school in the Ireland of the Seventies, I couldn't say that my experiences were uniformly good. The ethos of the college included admirable and progressive values which did battle with a simultaneous set of less likeable perspectives: a self-deluded sense of innate tribal superiority, a braying smugness and self-regard and arrogant condescension that I hope has disappeared from Blackrock College by now. Being fearless and bold is a fine aim, to be sure, but fearlessness and boldness, like all other qualities, can mutate into their ugly cousins.

The school still put a premium on conformism at the time I attended, but its notion of what should be conformed to, and what should be resisted, were largely the product of its own particular culture, existing, as it did, behind those high, neat rails, and defended by its castle battlements.

But it was changing, too. More women teachers appeared; sometimes sceptical, very smart and gifted. Father Cormac O'Brolchain's arrival on the scene breathed a great deal of life and energy through the place. I always feel that if and when the movie of Blackrock College in those years is ever made, he will be played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society mode. It was one of his particular gifts to be able to talk to a teenager as though that teenager was a person, not an adversary or a candidate for something.

You felt he actually respected you and was interested in what you thought. And if you didn't always know, just yet, what you thought, he was prepared to give you time to formulate it. He was also a mean guitarist, which greatly increased his stock among the small but fervent punk-rock contingent among us.

That extraordinary visionary, Cardinal John Henry Newman, explains in an essay called The Idea of a University -- which I first read while in sixth year at Blackrock College -- that the best thing educators can do is assemble young people and somehow not get in their way. I feel now, looking back, that something of that spirit and wisdom was at work in the school I attended. I learned a very great deal from the marvellous teachers whose names I have mentioned, and as much from some of my fellow students.

I mean this in the most literal and factual sense -- there were kids who liked to read fiction, for example, and to listen to unusual music, and to talk about ideas, or to question received notions, and I trace some of the happiest revelations of my life to conversations I had in my teens that became part of my DNA.

But I mean it in a wider and stranger way, too. Those of us who felt we did not belong to the predominant ideology of the school -- and every school has an ideology, whether it knows or not -- were given space to not belong, and perhaps we needed that, as much as nature's adherents needed something to adhere to. For that freedom to dissent from what is perceived to be an inheritance, I will always be grateful to my teachers. They rarely flinched or faltered from the deepest truth of all: that, in the end, we are the sum of our choices.

This article appears in 'Fearless and Bold: A celebration of Blackrock College', Third Millennium Publishing, London

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