AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 26 June 1912, Page 2

AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN.

Australian children ' are a delight (says C. N. Baeyrtz in an interesting article in the Lone Hand). -1 don't mean children of Mr Norman Lindsay's dreadfully convincing and amazing type,-but the children of the true Australian people; the children who are brought up with certain simple ideals, in an atmosphere that makes for wholesome growth. Competing at Ballarat, Wellington and Dunedin, I saw children so winsome and sweet that often my sole regret was that I could not honestly bracket them all for first place. These children were in some cases, I beg you to believe, far cleverer and more natural than any I have seen on the Australian stage. Some of the best and happiest work at all these Australasian competitions is done by the young children, and I often find myself wondering what becomes of the dear creatures when they grow up. The children only make one the more insistent in one's demand for better teachers. There is an intolerably bad practice followed in some schools, the practice of getting a whole class of children to repeat or in bone verse aloud, line by line. There is no better or surer way of destroying ability in the bud. The child forms a habit of sing-song and tlrat habit in many cases can never be broken.