TEACHING BY POST.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 5 September 1924, Page 9

TEACHING BY POST.

SUCCESS IN NEW SOUTH WALES,

SYDNEY, Aug. 21. When Mr S. H. Smith, now Director of Education, inaugurated in 1916 the system of teaching remote bush children by post—tile first work of its kind then attempted in Australia, and probably in the world—lie began with three lonely youngsters. To-day 2500 child 1 ren in New South Wales are receiving instruction bv post, and for this purpose 47 teachers, arc employed at a city, school. It is not claimed that teaching by post is on the whole as effective as. a, small • school, but it is lheeting, in an extraordinary successful way, a need in the remotest corners of our sparsely-settled country. Usually it is the mother who supervises the lessons and deals with the correspondence, and the experience of the department is that the glamour, the enthusiasm of childhood again .infects her and makes her as interested in the lessons as her youngsters. To many children in the back-blocks the mere fact of getting a letter from Sydney is a tremendous event in their lonely lives. But when they get their home exercises corrected and returned by post, accompanied by a friendly letter, in. addition to picture lesson books and the monthly school paper, the whole plan seems to them almost too good to be true. For the kids of Flanagan’s Flat and Boggy Creek the Education Department has opened up a new joy, a new interest in life.