"Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else." This, you may recall, was the pedagogical philosophy of Mr Gradgrind, late of Dickens's Hard Times, who held strong views on education.
Students sitting this afternoon's Leaving Certificate Higher Paper on Geography will no doubt, as usual, be presented with the option of a meteorology question - a heaven-sent opportunity to impress the examiner with such facts on the subject as may be at their disposal.
Some strange "facts" have emerged in these circumstances down the years. The assertion that "a planet is a body of Earth surrounded by a sky", for example, is plausible enough, as indeed is what is almost its corollary: "The moon is a planet just like Earth, only it is even deader." But when the technicalities of the complex interrelationship between these entities begin to be considered, the outcome is obscure: "The tides are a fight between the Earth and moon. All water tends towards the moon, because there is no water on the moon, and nature abhors a vacuum."
Focusing on our own planet's atmosphere, some "facts" are open to dispute. "When you smell an odourless gas," asserted one student, "it is probably carbon monoxide." Another, asked to name a gas that was lighter than air, responded: "Lighting". A third told the examiner: "Water is composed of two gins, Oxygin and Hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin. Hydrogin is gin and water." Then he added for good measure: "H2O is hot water, and CO2 is cold water."
Equally interesting views have emerged on precipitation-producing atmospheric mechanisms. "A super-saturated atmosphere," declared one hopeful, "is one that holds more than it can hold." No doubt this would lead to a situation where "Dew forms on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire." Similar conditions lead to the "the low heavy clouds we see, which are called columbus clouds".
Then comes the rain. "A moraine means heavy rain," has a certain logic in its etymology, and in the case of the student who wrote, "A rain shadow is a piece of ground, and when it rains, it is not touched", you can see where the ideas came from.
Neither, however, was as articulate as he who described snow as "frozen water gone fluffy", adding for good measure that "hail is when it hasn't".
But perhaps the most interesting assertion, and one which, when you think about it, may well contain a grain of evolutionary truth, was: "Mushrooms always grow in damp places, and so they look like umbrellas."