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.