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!
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: 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.]