CHAPTER XVII
THE THREE “R’S” IN AUSTRALIA
AWAY off here on the other side of the globe I have had a reminder of home. In the offices of the Minister of Public Instruction of New South Wales I found letters sent to Australia by children in the United States. Some of our school teachers interest their classes in geography by having the pupils exchange letters with boys and girls in other parts of the world. One such letter, which now lies before me, came from a thirteen-year-old boy in Nebraska and was answered by a Sydney lad of the same age. Both letters were read in class and here is what the Australian children heard about our “Corn-husker” state:
I live near Maitland, Nebraska. This is a fine place, only dry and windy at times.
Next I will tell you what we grow here. We use ploughs to stir up the ground and harrows to level it off. We plant oats and corn with a machine called a corn planter. We cultivate the corn with a cultivator three times. We cut the oats with a binder, shock it up and when it is dry it is hauled to the house and stacked. In the fall when the corn gets ripe we have to husk it and crib it up to keep it for our stock or sell it if we want to.
Our school begins at nine o’clock in the morning and closes at four o’clock in the afternoon. Then we go home and do our chores and get ready for supper. After supper I help in my father’s store.
Most of the girls help their mothers do housework. When they think they get old enough they get married if they can find somebody to suit them. Well, I guess I will close.
Yours truly,
Arthur Ashley.
Australia has good public schools. In all the states primary education is free and compulsory. In New South Wales if children between seven and fourteen are not sent to school their parents are fined one dollar and twenty-five cents for the first offence and five dollars or seven days’ imprisonment for each subsequent one. There are school officers who hunt up absent pupils, and the truants are sure to be caught. In Sydney a special school for truants has been established with a trained psychologist in charge, who makes a study of the causes and cure of “playing hookey.”
The Australians try to give every child a chance to go to school, but this is often difficult in the sparsely settled areas. In many districts children must go by train to the nearest school and some of the state-owned railroads give them passes on which they ride back and forth every day without any charge. Where there are a dozen pupils in a neighbourhood, provisional schools are established. When attendance rises above twelve the provisional school goes on the regular public-school list. If there are not enough scholars for a provisional school, what is known as a half-time school is formed, which is visited by a teacher on alternate days. In still more thinly peopled districts teachers go from house to house. During one year fourteen itinerant teachers in Queensland travelled a total of sixty-seven thousand miles to give instruction to eighteen hundred pupils. In that state, also, there are ten schools where small groups of children of outlying districts have a teacher only once a week, on Saturdays!
Although every child is given a common school education, public high schools are not yet numerous. Preparatory school training is had mostly in sectarian institutions such as the Church of England Grammar School at Melbourne.
In this land of great unsettled tracts some children ride to school on horseback, others are carried free on state-owned railroads, and many have to wait for the round of an itinerant teacher.
Butter made in Victoria competes with that from Denmark in British markets. The state helps to maintain high standards in dairy products by giving expert instruction to farmers and their wives.
New South Wales has three travelling schools. Each consists of a wagon or automobile with a tent for the teacher and one for the school. The teacher drives up, sets up his tents, takes out his books, administers a dose of instruction, and at the end of a week moves on to the next place. New South Wales has also correspondence courses for pupils cut off from other means of education. Grade subjects are taught by mail to children between the ages of seven and fourteen. These courses were started in 1916 as an experiment and have grown so popular that there are now seven hundred children enrolled at the Department of Education at Sydney and fifteen teachers are required to direct their work.
It is no wonder that practically every man, woman, and child in the Commonwealth can read and write, a fact that should take some of the conceit out of us when we recall that in the United States twenty-five per cent. of the men examined for our army in the World War were illiterates.
The Australian school child’s health is well looked after. Medical inspection, and often medical treatment, is provided in the city schools, and the school departments of several of the states have travelling hospitals and travelling medical, dental, and eye clinics.
For many years Australia had few public high schools, and state education stopped at the age of twelve or fourteen years. But high schools are now quite common and are growing in numbers and in the variety of subjects taught.
The schools of art are a feature of education in this part of the world. In Queensland the government contributes dollar for dollar, or rather pound for pound, to any town that raises a fund for this purpose. For instance, if a village will put up one thousand pounds to establish a library and school of art, the government will give another thousand, and will continue its gifts as the people give more. These schools of art teach not only drawing, painting, and music, but also typewriting and stenography, and, in fact, about everything you will find offered in the Young Men’s Christian Association courses in the United States. All have reading rooms, and their libraries are well supplied and largely patronized. The School of Arts in Sydney has a library of sixty thousand volumes.
In addition to these schools every city of any size has its technical schools. Sydney has a technological museum with eighty-two thousand exhibits including one thousand specimens of wool. The museum building alone cost one hundred thousand dollars. In Melbourne there is a Working Men’s College with buildings and equipment worth upward of a quarter of a million dollars. The college is open to both sexes and now has enrolled more than two thousand students. Many of its classes are held in the evening, when there are lectures upon applied science, engineering, mining, commercial law, and other technical subjects, as well as on the leading trades.
The twenty-five technical schools of Victoria are under the direction of the Education Department. Among the trade subjects taught are photography, wood and metal working, plumbing and gas fitting, carpentry, coach building, wool sorting, and house and sign painting, with cooking and dressmaking for the girl students.
Every state in the Commonwealth has its university at the state capital. I visited Sydney University, which has about as many students, both men and women, as Leland Stanford University in California. It confers degrees in art, science, law, and medicine, and the courses embrace all branches except theology. Its graduates are received at Oxford and Cambridge on an equal footing with those from British institutions. The same thing is true of graduates of the University of Melbourne.
Compared with the enrollment at similar institutions in the United States the attendance at Australia’s high schools and universities is not large. Our state of Washington and the state of Victoria have about the same population. Yet Washington’s high schools and its state university have four times as many pupils and students as have the Victoria secondary schools and the University of Melbourne combined. In all the state universities together there are less than seven thousand undergraduates. As a people, the Australians are sometimes criticized for not being interested in higher education. In fact, the true stories of the thousands of American boys and girls who make sacrifices and do all kinds of work to put themselves through college read like fiction to the young Australian.
Every state has its agricultural college and all run experimental farms to develop new methods and new crops. Agricultural experts are sent travelling around the country lecturing to the farmers, and special schools are organized to meet any new need.
For example, in order to help the dairy farmers build up a big business, the state governments had their agricultural schools give instruction in making butter and cheese. The result is that there are now a number of large butter and cheese factories in every state and the exports of dairy products are rapidly increasing.
Victoria and New South Wales now produce more than one hundred and twenty-five million pounds of butter and about fifteen million pounds of cheese every year. The dairy cows of New South Wales alone yield enough milk annually to give a gallon to every man, woman, and child in the United States, while if the butter export of the Commonwealth were sent to us, we would get nearly a pound apiece. Most of the Australian butter sold abroad goes to British markets.
The beginning of dairying in Victoria is interesting. One of the butter makers talked to me about it while I was in Melbourne. Said he:
“Twenty-five years ago we made no butter to speak of. Our total shipments did not amount to more than fifty thousand pounds a year. Then the government came in and helped the farmers. It arranged a scale of bounties for butter exports which was to continue for four years. For the first year we were to receive from the government a bonus of four cents per pound for all the butter shipped, the second year three cents, the third year two cents, and the fourth year one cent. The people at once began to study and experiment. Men who until then would not have a dairy cow on their places bought good stock, and now our butter is selling at high prices in both Asia and Europe. We use American machinery in our dairies.”
The number and circulation of Australian newspapers show that there is no lack of interest in reading among the people. Including the magazines and the trade journals, nearly a thousand newspapers and periodicals are published on the continent. In Melbourne the leading dailies are the Argus, the Age, and the Herald. The Sydney Herald is taken in all parts of Australia, and one sees the Sydney Mail everywhere. Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth have both morning and afternoon dailies, and, in fact, there is scarcely a large town on the continent which has not four or more papers. The most popular weeklies are the Sydney Bulletin and the Melbourne Australian, the Adelaide Observer, the West Australian, and the Sunday Sun. The big city newspapers have Saturday editions of many pages, which sell at four cents a copy and go out to all parts of the Commonwealth. There are all sorts of agricultural journals, sheep journals, and financial journals.
As a rule the Australian newspapers are less sensational than those in the United States, yet more lively than the English newspapers. Judging by the amount of advertising they carry, I should say that the owner of a popular Australian paper has a gold mine.
Some of the aborigines are housed at the back-block mission stations, where their children are given an elementary education. But most of them are nomads and call only occasionally on the state aborigine boards for supplies of food and clothing.
The Australian aborigines were cannibals in the past, and still stand at the bottom of the ladder of human progress. They are incapable of advancing in contact with civilization and are now a dying race.