This follow-up study set out to examine whether parents' recollections of their own school would predict their degree of satisfaction with the functioning of their child's school. A group of academically educated and vocationally educated parents with a child in preschool (N=391) were asked to think back to their primary school days and evaluate their school; these parents were then asked to indicate their satisfaction with the functioning of their child's school once the child had reached the first, the third and the fifth grade. The parents' recollections were found to influence their degree of satisfaction: among the academically educated respondents, the parents with relatively positive recollections showed higher levels of satisfaction than the parents with relatively negative recollections did; and among the vocationally educated respondents, the mothers with relatively positive recollections indicated higher levels of satisfaction than the mothers with relatively negative recollections did. It was suggested that parents' recollections may be seen as an experiencebased component of their general attitude towards education.In a newspaper column of his, the Finnish poet Tommy Tabermann (2005) wrote about "the wounds that are covered, apparently forever, by thin scars." What he meant was "the memories of denigration and mocking", which most of us recall, he claims, when we think back to our school days. This study set out to examine the poet's assumption that the memories of our school days are there, just below the surface as it were, ready to activate themselves. More precisely, we asked whether parents' recollections -both negative and positive ones -of their own school would predict their satisfaction with the functioning of their child's school during the first five school years.Everyone has personal memories, good and bad ones, of going to school. As a child starts school, the parents' own school memories are likely to activate themselves and to function as a basis for their evaluation of the child's schooling. For instance, parents usually make comparisons between particular aspects of their own and their child's school: in what respects their own school was better and in what respects things have improved (Metso, 2004).Parents' school recollections have attracted surprisingly little empirical research, although there is a fair amount of agreement that the social-psychological influence of the