How to Say It ...


At a recent "panel discussion" in one of our great universities
several speakers aired their views on "creative education", solemnly
or otherwise. One pupil got up to remark:"I have discovered that if
you have pupils of greater ability, you will get better results"; and
the wall of the university (it is averred) rocked with this momentous
announcement. Someone suggested that the speaker would have been much
better advised had he said something like this: "If the correlation of
intrinsic competency to actual numerical representation is definitely
high,then the thoroughly objective conclusion may inexpugnably be
reached that the scholastic derivations and outgrowths will attain a
pattern of unified superiority."

No one would have known what he was talking about, and he would there
after have been regarded with awe as a pedagogical pundit.

-- Henry Grattan Doyle.